Master Reverse Proxies, Load Balancers, and API Gateways for Epic Systems

Through the Layers: Reverse Proxies, Load Balancers, and API Gateways

Understanding the Middle Layers of Modern Systems

In modern system architecture, components like reverse proxies, load balancers, and API gateways are essential for handling how users and services interact with backend systems. While they’re sometimes confused or thought to serve the same function, each plays a distinct and critical role in improving scalability, reliability, performance, and security.

These components are especially important in cloud-native and microservices environments, where services are spread across multiple servers and locations, and where managing API traffic efficiently becomes a key requirement. However, their responsibilities can overlap, and choosing the right one (or the right combination) depends on the system's design and goals.

In this newsletter, we’ll walk through how each of these tools works, what problems they solve, and how they fit into modern architectures. Instead of textbook definitions, we’re sharing our own insights as engineers, reflecting on how understanding these layers changed how we design systems—from small web apps to large distributed platforms.

Let’s break them down, layer by layer.

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Where the Reverse Proxy First Made Sense

The reverse proxy was the first concept that clicked for us. It felt like a smart middleman—something that stood between the outside world and our backend servers, quietly handling things behind the scenes.

What made reverse proxies valuable to us wasn’t just routing. It was everything else they brought along: caching responses so our app didn’t have to work overtime, terminating SSL so our services didn’t each need to handle certificates, and protecting our infrastructure by rate-limiting suspicious traffic. Nginx was our go-to. It did the job well, and once we understood its flexibility, we started seeing it less as just a server and more like a foundational building block.

What surprised us most was how much control we had without touching any of the core application code. The reverse proxy gave us leverage, handling performance tweaks and security upgrades purely through configuration. We weren’t rewriting software; we were optimizing how it was accessed.

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Load Balancing Wasn’t Just About Scaling

Eventually, our traffic grew, and that’s when load balancers entered the picture. At first, they seemed like reverse proxies—but their job turned out to be very different.

For us, load balancers weren’t about caching or transforming traffic. They were about resilience and scale. When one server was overloaded, the load balancer shifted traffic to another. If a server went down, it stopped sending traffic to it altogether. Suddenly, our system was no longer one machine—it was a pool of resources that looked like one service to the user.

We played around with different algorithms: round-robin, least connections, even sticky sessions. We experimented with Layer 4 versus Layer 7 balancing and saw how deeper protocol awareness could help with smarter routing.

What we learned here was bigger than just uptime—it was about thinking in terms of distributed resources. Load balancers made scaling feel systematic, not chaotic.

API Gateways Made Microservices Bearable

Then came microservices—and with them, the real need for an API gateway.

We used to think an API gateway was just a fancy reverse proxy. And yes, it does handle routing, but that’s just one piece. What changed our minds was when we needed authentication, rate limiting, and request transformation across dozens of services.

Instead of baking auth into every microservice, the gateway handled it. Instead of exposing five different endpoints to the client, the gateway orchestrated them and returned one unified response. It gave us a central point of control—not just for routing, but for policy, security, and monitoring.

Tools like Kong, Amazon API Gateway, and Apigee gave us insights into API performance, request patterns, and error rates. For a while, our gateway became one of the most critical parts of the stack. It wasn’t just a traffic manager—it was the guardian of our API ecosystem.

We started to think of it like this: if our services were a team, the gateway was the coach—deciding who played, who rested, and making sure everything stayed on message.

Where It All Comes Together

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from all of this, it’s that these tools work best together—not in competition.

The reverse proxy gives us control and protection. The load balancer gives us scale and fault tolerance. The API gateway gives us structure and governance. Depending on what we’re building—a monolith, a microservices architecture, a real-time service—we lean more heavily on one or another.

For example, in one of our setups, a load balancer distributes traffic across multiple API gateways. Those gateways then route requests to different services, while reverse proxies handle internal service-to-service communication and caching. It’s a bit of orchestration, but it works because we understand the role each part plays.

Looking back, we realize we don’t need to memorize definitions—we just need to know what we’re solving for. Are we protecting the edge? Directing traffic? Managing APIs? The right tool follows naturally from the need.

We hope sharing our story clears up some of the confusion. And if you ever catch yourself mixing up these terms, know we’ve been there too. The important thing is not knowing the perfect definition—it’s understanding the purpose.

That’s it!

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