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What are the use cases for setting up reverse proxies for production web apps (of medium to small scale) versus using a CDN like Panther Express/CDNetworks? (G

• aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  define:medium. You might want a reverse proxy for production web apps if you have an application on a few servers (where it also fills the role of load balancer), if you want to be able to serve stale content if your app servers go down, you want to use awesomeness that is ESI, and you don't want latency between your edge and your app servers for quick flow-through, if you want sticky sessions (ewwwww!), et cetera.
• pvg 17y ago
  There are lots of good reasons that go beyond content caching (which is the topic of the article). Somewhat terse write-up here: http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/01/proxy.html http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/01/proxy.html The basic idea is that there's fair bit of useful logic that can be handled by a simpler, lighter-weight, more easily securable front-end system than the lumbering tank that is your app server. This includes basic load balancing/failover, partitioning (requests of type foo go to these servers, all the low-latency ajax stuff over there, static content somewhere else), babysitting slow clients, blackholing malformed requests, etc.
• jacquesm 17y ago
  CDNs are fantastic for serving up high volume static content (images, css, downloadables) but the are really not appropriate for dynamic web pages that are personalized to the viewer. In other words, you can serve up just about anything that does not need up-to-the-minute customization using a CDN.