What is the role of a reverse proxy in load balancing for microservices?

Short answer: A reverse proxy acts as an intermediary between clients and the services, forwarding requests from clients to the appropriate backend service instances.

Explain a bit more

Role in load balancing: Traffic Routing: The reverse proxy (e.g., Nginx, HAProxy) forwards incoming traffic to different service instances based on load balancing policies. SSL Termination: The reverse proxy can handle SSL/TLS encryption, offloading this task from the service instances, which simplifies the architecture. Health Checks: A reverse proxy can perform health checks on service instances and route traffic only to healthy instances. In a typical microservices setup, a reverse proxy like Envoy or Nginx is used to handle traffic routing and distribute the load evenly across the microservices.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.