Question: What is reverse proxy in a network ? 

Answer: A reverse proxy is a proxy server that is installed within the neighborhood of one or more servers. Typically, reverse proxies are utilized in front of webservers. All connections coming from the Internet addressed to one of the webservers are routed through the proxy server, which may either entirely deal with the request itself, or pass the request wholly or partially to the main webserver.\n\nThere are several reasons for installing reverse proxy servers:\n\n    * Security: the proxy server is an additional layer of defense and therefore protects the webservers further up the chain\n    * Encryption / SSL acceleration: when secure websites are created, the SSL encryption is sometimes not done by the webserver itself, but by a reverse proxy that is equipped with SSL acceleration hardware.\n    * Load distribution: the reverse proxy can distribute the load to several servers, each server serving its own application area. In the case of reverse proxying in the neighborhood of webservers, the reverse proxy may need to have to rewrite the URL's in each webpage (translation from externally known URLs to the internal locations)\n    * Caching static content: A reverse proxy can offload the webservers by caching static content, such as images. Proxy caching of this sort can often satisfy a considerable amount of website requests, greatly reducing the load on the central web server.
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