Reverse Proxy Deep Dive: Why HTTP Parsing at the Edge Is Harder Than It Looks
In Part 1 of this series, we explored a high-level overview of reverse proxies and dived deep into connection management. This post shifts our focus to the intricate world of HTTP handling within a reverse proxy. Deep Dive into HTTP Handling At a high level, the HTTP workflow from a proxy’s perspective might seem straightforward: Receive the request from the client Parse and sanitize the request Uses different requst metadata (path, headers, cookies) to select an upstream host Manipulates the