What is the role of a reverse proxy in load balancing for microservices?

reverse proxy acts as an intermediary between clients and the services, forwarding

requests from clients to the appropriate backend service instances.

Role in load balancing:

• Traffic Routing: The reverse proxy (e.g., Nginx, HAProxy) forwards incoming traffic

to different service instances based on load balancing policies.

• SSL Termination: The reverse proxy can handle SSL/TLS encryption, offloading this

task from the service instances, which simplifies the architecture.

• Health Checks: A reverse proxy can perform health checks on service instances and

route traffic only to healthy instances.

In a typical microservices setup, a reverse proxy like Envoy or Nginx is used to handle

traffic routing and distribute the load evenly across the microservices.