4 ms·

I guess I have to ask: What exactly is the use case for a tailor made reverse proxy? What customizations do people typically want to offload to the reverse prox

I guess I have to ask: What exactly is the use case for a tailor made reverse proxy? What customizations do people typically want to offload to the reverse proxy?

9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
The main use case that comes to my mind is when you want to deploy a proxy in an environment where the developer needs full oversight of the proxy internals and doesn’t want to learn the particulars of configuring any given proxy software suite. Additionally, YARP is cross-platform capable, so you can run the same proxy on Linux, macOS, and Windows. NGINX doesn’t even provide that, for example. In terms of customizations, YARP is more like “what feature do you need to build in” than “how do I need to configure”. You can quickly build a simple reverse proxy and just about as easily setup a full load balancing solution, but the simple use case doesn’t need to include any of the code for the advanced use case.
- Macha 5y ago
  > Additionally, YARP is cross-platform capable, so you can run the same proxy on Linux, macOS, and Windows. NGINX doesn’t even provide that, for example nginx runs on all three of those platforms. If you mean the binary, this is surely misleading as you just move the burden from getting your platform specific binary to your platform specific .net runtime.
  - chunk_it_away99 5y ago
    NGINX is also more portable. It runs on more architectures and operating systems than .NET/C#. I can literally throw a stick and hit several devices in my office that NGINX runs on but C# does not.
    - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
      Does nginx have Tizen support?
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
    > Only the select() and poll() (1.15.9) connection processing methods are currently used, so high performance and scalability should not be expected. https://nginx.org/en/docs/windows.html https://nginx.org/en/docs/windows.html
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  > The main use case that comes to my mind is when you want to deploy a proxy in an environment where the developer needs full oversight of the proxy internals and doesn’t want to learn the particulars of configuring any given proxy software suite. Yes, when does this happen? That's what I'm trying to understand. You've provided some possible feature benefits to a DIY solution but you're really just trading NGINX internals for YARP internals here. At first glance, to my eye, one of those is going to have better community support and documentation. > Additionally, YARP is cross-platform capable, so you can run the same proxy on Linux, macOS, and Windows. NGINX doesn’t even provide that, for example. Yes it does? You might need to elaborate because this is just incorrect but I suspect you're trying to make a different point. > In terms of customizations, YARP is more like “what feature do you need to build in” than “how do I need to configure”. You can quickly build a simple reverse proxy and just about as easily setup a full load balancing solution, but the simple use case doesn’t need to include any of the code for the advanced use case. My main issue with this idea is that the average consumer of this is going to be better positioned to handle the engineering hurdles of writing their own advanced use cases.
  - oaiey 5y ago
    YARP was not a self motivated product. Engineering groups within Microsoft asked the .NET group to help them with their custom (.NET) reverse proxies. And the .NET group added it to their portfolio. So you are right, it is a very specialized situation, but the key stakeholders who asked, contributed and collaborated with the .NET group are exactly these engineers who previously did a DIY solution.
    - BeefWellington 5y ago
      > YARP was not a self motivated product. Engineering groups within Microsoft asked the .NET group to help them with their custom (.NET) reverse proxies. And the .NET group added it to their portfolio. This is an interesting take that I think is perhaps naive. Microsoft has a vested interest in pushing .NET as a development platform and can push teams to use the company's flagship programming stack in everything it does. From the perspective of given individual teams within the company this may not appear to be self-motivated but how could it not be, given the driving requirements to use MS-approved technology stacks? What your comment misses the mark on is what the driving force behind those engineering decisions is. If the decision is driven by corporate guidance to use .NET or else (this is a hypothetical), it's not exactly because the engineers themselves wanted to write something from scratch in .NET to solve a particular well-solved problem.
Moto7451 5y ago
We have one at work. This came from a distrust of developers’ abilities to correctly configure Apache and NGINX and a desire for the ability to roll out company wide changes that affect reverse proxying or headers we always want to set or remove on each request cycle.
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  That's interesting that the time spent developing your own solution was viewed as simpler and a better investment than using existing solutions out there (even commercial ones). If you can speak to it, when it was rolled out were there numerous issues related to clients misbehaving? IME projects like this are "easy" to get out the door as it were, but usually wind up causing a load of support headaches due to massive implementation gaps.
franga2000 5y ago
A common one are multi-tenant applications where you want to dynamically (depending on data in a database for example) route requests to different places (like docker containers). The first specific example I can think of is JupyterHub - it handles user management and starting/stopping Jupyter Notebook servers, then provides a reverse proxy for users to access their notebook servers directly.
HdS84 5y ago
We have used this on a net core app when yarp was only a very basic half abandoned solution. Basically, we needed to to auth on each request (can the user see this per a slightly complicated rights system) and we routed to automatically spin up containers,so discovery was also custom
jayd16 5y ago
Custom load balancing rules could be an obvious usecase.

I guess I have to ask: What exactly is the use case for a tailor made reverse proxy? What customizations do people typically want to offload to the reverse proxy?

9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago

The main use case that comes to my mind is when you want to deploy a proxy in an environment where the developer needs full oversight of the proxy internals and doesn’t want to learn the particulars of configuring any given proxy software suite. Additionally, YARP is cross-platform capable, so you can run the same proxy on Linux, macOS, and Windows. NGINX doesn’t even provide that, for example. In terms of customizations, YARP is more like “what feature do you need to build in” than “how do I need to configure”. You can quickly build a simple reverse proxy and just about as easily setup a full load balancing solution, but the simple use case doesn’t need to include any of the code for the advanced use case.

Macha 5y ago
> Additionally, YARP is cross-platform capable, so you can run the same proxy on Linux, macOS, and Windows. NGINX doesn’t even provide that, for example nginx runs on all three of those platforms. If you mean the binary, this is surely misleading as you just move the burden from getting your platform specific binary to your platform specific .net runtime.
- chunk_it_away99 5y ago
  NGINX is also more portable. It runs on more architectures and operating systems than .NET/C#. I can literally throw a stick and hit several devices in my office that NGINX runs on but C# does not.
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
    Does nginx have Tizen support?
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  > Only the select() and poll() (1.15.9) connection processing methods are currently used, so high performance and scalability should not be expected. https://nginx.org/en/docs/windows.html https://nginx.org/en/docs/windows.html
BeefWellington 5y ago
> The main use case that comes to my mind is when you want to deploy a proxy in an environment where the developer needs full oversight of the proxy internals and doesn’t want to learn the particulars of configuring any given proxy software suite. Yes, when does this happen? That's what I'm trying to understand. You've provided some possible feature benefits to a DIY solution but you're really just trading NGINX internals for YARP internals here. At first glance, to my eye, one of those is going to have better community support and documentation. > Additionally, YARP is cross-platform capable, so you can run the same proxy on Linux, macOS, and Windows. NGINX doesn’t even provide that, for example. Yes it does? You might need to elaborate because this is just incorrect but I suspect you're trying to make a different point. > In terms of customizations, YARP is more like “what feature do you need to build in” than “how do I need to configure”. You can quickly build a simple reverse proxy and just about as easily setup a full load balancing solution, but the simple use case doesn’t need to include any of the code for the advanced use case. My main issue with this idea is that the average consumer of this is going to be better positioned to handle the engineering hurdles of writing their own advanced use cases.
- oaiey 5y ago
  YARP was not a self motivated product. Engineering groups within Microsoft asked the .NET group to help them with their custom (.NET) reverse proxies. And the .NET group added it to their portfolio. So you are right, it is a very specialized situation, but the key stakeholders who asked, contributed and collaborated with the .NET group are exactly these engineers who previously did a DIY solution.
  - BeefWellington 5y ago
    > YARP was not a self motivated product. Engineering groups within Microsoft asked the .NET group to help them with their custom (.NET) reverse proxies. And the .NET group added it to their portfolio. This is an interesting take that I think is perhaps naive. Microsoft has a vested interest in pushing .NET as a development platform and can push teams to use the company's flagship programming stack in everything it does. From the perspective of given individual teams within the company this may not appear to be self-motivated but how could it not be, given the driving requirements to use MS-approved technology stacks? What your comment misses the mark on is what the driving force behind those engineering decisions is. If the decision is driven by corporate guidance to use .NET or else (this is a hypothetical), it's not exactly because the engineers themselves wanted to write something from scratch in .NET to solve a particular well-solved problem.

Moto7451 5y ago

We have one at work. This came from a distrust of developers’ abilities to correctly configure Apache and NGINX and a desire for the ability to roll out company wide changes that affect reverse proxying or headers we always want to set or remove on each request cycle.

BeefWellington 5y ago
That's interesting that the time spent developing your own solution was viewed as simpler and a better investment than using existing solutions out there (even commercial ones). If you can speak to it, when it was rolled out were there numerous issues related to clients misbehaving? IME projects like this are "easy" to get out the door as it were, but usually wind up causing a load of support headaches due to massive implementation gaps.

franga2000 5y ago

A common one are multi-tenant applications where you want to dynamically (depending on data in a database for example) route requests to different places (like docker containers). The first specific example I can think of is JupyterHub - it handles user management and starting/stopping Jupyter Notebook servers, then provides a reverse proxy for users to access their notebook servers directly.

HdS84 5y ago

We have used this on a net core app when yarp was only a very basic half abandoned solution. Basically, we needed to to auth on each request (can the user see this per a slightly complicated rights system) and we routed to automatically spin up containers,so discovery was also custom

jayd16 5y ago

Custom load balancing rules could be an obvious usecase.