The Traffic Control Room: Reverse Proxy, Load Balancer, and API Gateway in the AI Era Building a GenAI application starts with a model, but scaling it for production requires a sophisticated traffic management strategy. As we move from simple prompt-response interactions to complex Agentic AI workflows involving multiple microservices, vector databases, and external LLM providers, the roles of networking components become critical. Many developers confuse the Reverse Proxy , the Load Balancer , and the API Gateway . While they share some features, in a high-stakes AI environment, they serve distinct and complementary roles. Generated by AI 1. The Reverse Proxy: Your Security Guard A Reverse Proxy sits in front of a web server and forwards client requests to it. It is the most basic layer of protection. When to use it: When you have a single backend server (e.g., a standalone GPU instance running an LLM). Key Roles: It handles SSL termination (encrypting and decrypting traffic), basic...