Imagine you are working at home, and you couldn’t open a webpage. You concluded that your IP is blocked. You may look up a proxy server/service from which you access the webpage. In simple words a proxy server helps to keep real identity private. Now you might be thinking, what is proxy???
Let’s take the same example:
A proxy server acts as a gate way and the website you are trying to access (It takes the request and makes a request to the website on your behalf), meaning when you couldn’t access the website you went over a proxy server who helped you by acting as a middle man and got connected with the website and sent you the content you want to access.
So, when you visit the website, the admin (usually automated) will recognize you from the IP address (in this case proxy), since its proxy server is sending the request from a whitelisted IP they have no reason to deny access to the webpage, once the proxy server is able to access the website it will pass the information using the same channel.
Now you will think!! Wait that’s VPN – What’s the difference???
A VPN and Proxy server has one main difference, “encryption”.
Now we will discuss that difference in the next blog!
(Back to topic) A proxy server/provider will provide you configuration such as IP address, port details etc to set up or many times they have an application supporting the service, many providers such as Netnut, Scraper API and many more are popular options. Proxy can support as firewall, which can help filter content.
Many organizations use proxy to protect their users and data, by filtering the websites, which helps mitigate the risk of exposure and administrators can view the logs and block people visiting which could be malicious content. Also, with the help of proxy admins can cache content which was used previously and send it to another user, avoiding the access to the website multiple times.
These are the places where proxy servers are useful:
Caching: It’s one of the most used cases where people request certain access to content, and you can cache it and store to a centralized storage. If anyone else makes the same request, proxy can serve the cached content.
Anonymity: Proxy helps to hide identity, as it serves as middleman, so the websites won’t know who is accessing the content or the IP address of the end user.
Logs: In an organization you can track the request made by the users. In a funny way if one of your employees is on social media all the time you will know. 😛
Block Sites: Organization can block websites or content to protect their assets, users can download malicious data unknowingly, which can impact the organization. I think government would use this more often where people can only use internet via proxy server.
Microservices: If a user makes a http1 request a proxy can upgrade that request http2, proxy can be used in many protocols as configured. This can used both ways proxy and reverse proxy.
Well now you might be thinking what’s a reverse proxy??
Think of it as a reverse of what we understood. If you are opening google, the proxy server will act as google for you, then makes a request to google’s server. It can even direct traffic to the different server in the same domain. (if configured).
Load Balancing: Proxy can help in networking, if we configure it to behave on number of requests received or select number of requests; for an example 3 out of 10 people should have see a thumbnail. It can also direct the traffic according to your configuration. Proxy servers have evolved over the years and are highly configured to match infrastructure of organizations which helps them achieve their goals.