Phase 5Intermediate6 of 8 in Networking

Load Balancing & Reverse Proxies

L4 vs L7, balancing algorithms and health checks, then hands-on Nginx, HAProxy, and Envoy.

Between the internet and your application there is almost always a proxy or load balancer: a cloud ALB, Nginx, HAProxy, Envoy, or an ingress controller. This phase explains what they do, then configures Nginx step by step so production configs stop being mysterious.

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4 topics ~27 min 5 code blocks & diagrams

Start with the first topic

5.1

Load Balancing: L4 vs L7, Algorithms & Health Checks

A load balancer spreads requests across healthy backends; L4 balancers forward connections, L7 balancers understand requests, and the algorithm plus health checks decide how evenly and safely traffic is spread.

7 min 1 diagram practice

5.2

Nginx as a Reverse Proxy

Nginx sits in front of your app, accepts client connections, and forwards requests to upstream servers; a handful of directives (server, location, upstream, proxy_pass, headers, timeouts) cover most real configs.

6 min 1 diagram practice

5.3

Nginx: Static Files, Compression, Caching & Rate Limiting

Beyond forwarding, Nginx serves static files efficiently, compresses responses, caches upstream answers, and rate-limits clients — taking load off the application.

7 min 1 code practice

5.4

HAProxy, Envoy & Choosing a Proxy

HAProxy is a battle-tested, very fast L4/L7 load balancer; Envoy is a dynamically configured L7 proxy built for microservices and service meshes; knowing their strengths helps you pick and debug them.

7 min 1 diagram 1 code practice

Command Palette

Load Balancing: L4 vs L7, Algorithms & Health Checks

Nginx as a Reverse Proxy

Nginx: Static Files, Compression, Caching & Rate Limiting

HAProxy, Envoy & Choosing a Proxy