- Load Balancer distributes traffic across multiple servers to balance load.
- Reverse Proxy sits in front of servers and forwards client requests to them.
- All Load Balancers are reverse proxies, but not all reverse proxies do load balancing.
- Reverse proxy can also handle caching, SSL termination, and compression.
- Load balancer focuses on distribution of traffic.
- Reverse proxy focuses on interfacing and security between client and server.
- Examples:
- Reverse proxy only: NGINX serving a single backend with SSL
- Load balancer: AWS ELB distributing requests across multiple servers