Reverse Proxy vs Forward Proxy: What's the Difference and When to Use Each? or Reverse Proxy vs Forwa

Forward proxy: Your clients talk to the internet THROUGH it.

Reverse proxy: The internet talks to your servers THROUGH it.

Simple as that.

Use cases? Forward for privacy/control (like schools filtering sites). Reverse for scaling/protection (like hiding your API servers).

Apache and NGINX are classics for reverse proxy setups.