What distinguishes a load balancer from a reverse proxy, and what are the use-case scenarios for each?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Load balancers are meant to distribute traffic across multiple servers. They
distribute inbound requests to one or more servers. Load balancers are used to
increase availability and to ensure reliability. Sometimes load balancers
distribute traffic via DNS, by rotating the IP that the requested name resolves
to.

Reverse proxies take inbound traffic and forward it to a server that is not
exposed to external traffic. It serves as a middle layer so the backend server
IP is not exposed to internet traffic, which is good for security. This protects
the backend servers from users, improves security and performance, and allows
the reverse proxy to cache requests. They can also be used for SSL to encrypt
traffic so the encryption is not running on the server handling the request.

What distinguishes a load balancer from a reverse proxy, and what are the use-case scenarios for each?

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