Imagine an API proxy server as the dedicated concierge for your backend services. It acts as an intelligent intermediary, meticulously positioned between your applications and their end-users, handling every request with precision and control. This strategic configuration is instrumental in reducing system complexity, fortifying security, and streamlining the communication flow between various components within your software ecosystem.
Demystifying the API Proxy Server: A Clear Explanation
To truly grasp the concept of an API proxy server, let’s use a relatable analogy: a bustling, high-end restaurant. Within the kitchen, you have a team of highly skilled chefs, each a master of their craft. These chefs represent your backend services – powerful, specialized, and focused on their specific tasks. You wouldn’t want customers directly entering the kitchen to place orders; it would lead to chaos, overwhelm the chefs, and pose significant security risks.
Instead, a professional front-of-house manager stands at the entrance. This manager is, in essence, your API proxy server. Their responsibilities include handling all incoming requests (reservations), verifying guests’ identities (authentication), managing the flow of people to prevent congestion (traffic control), and directing each guest to the correct table or section (request routing). This setup allows the kitchen staff to concentrate on what they do best: preparing exquisite meals without interruption or direct exposure to every customer interaction.
The Core Responsibilities of This Digital Manager
This analogy perfectly captures the function of an API proxy server. It doesn’t “cook” the data itself; instead, it orchestrates the entire process, ensuring everything runs more smoothly, securely, and efficiently. Just as the restaurant manager ensures the kitchen is never overwhelmed and every guest enjoys a superior experience, the proxy server maintains the stability and high performance of your backend services.
Let’s delve deeper into the specific duties of this crucial digital manager, dissecting the layers of functionality that an API proxy brings to the table.
A Glimpse into the API Proxy Server’s Key Capabilities
The following table summarizes the primary responsibilities of an API proxy server, offering a quick yet comprehensive overview of its core functions. It serves as a practical guide to understanding the various tasks this “manager” performs behind the scenes, ensuring the seamless operation and robust security of your digital infrastructure.
| Function | Practical Analogy (Restaurant Manager) | Technical Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Security Enforcement | Verifying reservations and checking IDs at the door. | Authenticates API keys, tokens, and other credentials before requests reach the backend, preventing unauthorized access. |
| Traffic Management | Managing queues and controlling the speed of guest arrivals. | Implements rate limiting and throttling to prevent a flood of requests from overwhelming backend services, ensuring stability during peak traffic. |
| Request Routing | Directing guests to their designated tables or areas. | Routes incoming requests to the correct backend service or microservice based on URL path, headers, or other criteria. |
| Performance Optimization | Having popular appetizers prepped for quick serving. | Caches frequently requested static responses to serve them faster, reducing latency and offloading work from the backend. |
| Protocol Translation | Translating foreign guests’ orders for the kitchen. | Transforms requests from one format (e.g., SOAP) to another (e.g., REST), allowing modern clients to communicate seamlessly with legacy backend systems. |
| Logging & Analytics | Recording guests, orders, and peak times. | Logs metadata about every API call, providing invaluable insights into usage patterns, performance bottlenecks, and potential security threats. |
As you can see, an API proxy is far more than a simple conduit; it’s an intelligent gateway that adds significant value. It fundamentally separates the client-facing interface of your application from your backend implementation. This crucial separation grants you the freedom to modify or update your backend services without directly impacting how client applications interact with them, ensuring greater flexibility and maintainability.
The rise of API proxies is not accidental; it’s a direct response to a significant paradigm shift in how software is constructed. Around 2010, as enterprises began to decompose monolithic applications into smaller, more manageable microservices, the need for a central control point became glaringly obvious. Fast forward to 2019, and tech giants were already processing trillions of API requests annually. Proxy servers became absolutely vital for securely handling such an immense scale of traffic. Today, this intermediary layer is a cornerstone of modern IT architecture, enabling businesses to innovate faster by abstracting away the underlying technical complexities from their clients.
The Journey of an API Request Through a Proxy Server
To truly appreciate the functionality of an API proxy server, let’s trace the complete lifecycle of a request from its initiation to its completion. Imagine someone using a mobile banking application, tapping a button to check their account balance. This seemingly simple tap triggers a sophisticated, multi-step orchestration completed in milliseconds, all facilitated by the proxy server.
This entire process unfolds seamlessly behind the scenes, completely imperceptible to the user, who simply experiences a fast and secure application. The proxy server acts as a central checkpoint, ensuring every interaction is legitimate, efficient, and accurately delivered to its intended destination.
Step 1: The Client Initiates the Request
Everything begins on the user’s mobile device. When they tap “Check Balance,” the mobile application packages an API request. This small data bundle contains all the necessary information to complete the task, such as an authentication token and specific details about the request (e.g., GET /api/v1/accounts/balance).
However, this request isn’t sent directly to the bank’s core systems. Instead, it’s directed to a single, known address: the API proxy server. This is the only “front door” the application ever needs to communicate with, providing a consistent and simplified access point regardless of the backend’s internal complexity.
Step 2: The Proxy Intercepts and Validates
The moment the request arrives, the API proxy springs into action, operating simultaneously as a vigilant security guard and an intelligent traffic controller. It doesn’t just pass messages along; it subjects them to a thorough inspection.
This is where a critical series of security and management rules are enforced:
- Authentication and Authorization: First, the proxy verifies the request’s credentials, such as an API key or a JSON Web Token (JWT). It asks: “Is this a genuine, logged-in user? Do they have permission to view the balance of this specific account?” If the credentials are invalid, forged, or expired, the request is immediately rejected, preventing it from ever nearing sensitive backend services. This acts as a robust first line of defense against unauthorized access.
- Rate Limiting: Next, the proxy consults its logs. Has this user or IP address bombarded us excessively in the last minute? This mechanism prevents abuse, whether from a malfunctioning application repeatedly sending requests or a malicious denial-of-service (DoS) attack. If the limits are exceeded, the proxy returns an error (e.g., an “429 Too Many Requests” status code) without engaging the backend, thus protecting your core infrastructure from overload.
- Request Transformation: Sometimes, the client application and backend service speak slightly different “languages” or expect different data formats. The proxy can act as a translator, modifying the request by adding headers, converting formats from XML to JSON (or vice-versa), or rewriting URL paths to match the backend’s expectations. This ensures compatibility and reduces the burden on client-side developers to match specific backend requirements.
By handling these crucial checks at the edge, the API proxy server establishes a protective barrier. It ensures that only clean, validated, and correctly formatted traffic ever reaches your core services, allowing them to focus solely on executing their actual business logic without being burdened by security or compatibility concerns.
Step 3: The Proxy Forwards to the Backend
Once a request has been thoroughly vetted and prepared, the API proxy server consults its internal mappings to determine its exact destination. In a modern microservices architecture, the service responsible for processing “balance” might reside on an entirely different server than the service handling “transaction history.”
The client application remains completely unaware of these intricate internal details. The proxy server intelligently forwards the validated request to the correct microservice responsible for retrieving the account balance. This crucial separation is a huge advantage, allowing engineers to move, update, or scale backend services without breaking the client-facing mobile application, thus fostering agility in development and deployment.
Step 4: The Proxy Handles the Response
After the backend service finds the account balance (e.g., “$1,234.56”), it sends the data back, but not directly to the user’s phone. It returns to the API proxy server, whose job is not yet complete.
The proxy captures this response and performs a few final tasks. It might log the transaction for analytical purposes, transform the data into a format specifically required by the mobile application, or—most importantly—cache the response. If the user taps the same button five seconds later, the proxy can immediately serve the cached data without needing to access the backend again. The result? A significantly enhanced and faster user experience.
Finally, it sends the optimized response back to the user’s device, where “$1,234.56” promptly appears on the screen, reflecting a seamless and efficient interaction.
Unlocking Key Advantages of Using API Proxy Servers
Deploying an API proxy server is not merely a technical adjustment; it’s a strategic business decision. Placing it between your clients and core systems dramatically enhances security, speed, and control in ways that are difficult to achieve otherwise. These advantages directly translate into heightened user satisfaction, robust security defenses, and more agile development cycles, making your overall system more resilient and responsive.
Let’s dive deeper into the tangible benefits you can expect when a proxy becomes central to your API strategy, exploring how it directly impacts various facets of your application’s performance and operational integrity.
Fortifying Your Security Posture
You can think of an API proxy as your services’ formidable first line of defense, establishing a robust perimeter around your backend. It inspects every piece of incoming traffic, intercepting malicious requests before they ever have a chance to reach your sensitive systems. This significantly reduces the security attack surface of your actual application code.
A practical example is preventing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. You can configure the proxy to limit traffic from any single IP address to, say, 100 requests per minute. When an attacker attempts to flood your service with thousands of requests, the proxy blocks them after the 100th request, absorbing the brunt of the attack and ensuring your legitimate users remain unaffected. Furthermore, proxies can perform input validation, filter suspicious headers, and hide your backend server’s true IP addresses, adding layers of obscurity and protection. They are also ideal for centralizing authentication credentials, meaning sensitive API keys never have to live in client-side code where they could be compromised.
By abstracting the backend from direct exposure, API proxy servers drastically minimize your application’s attack surface, ensuring that only verified, authorized, and secure requests ever reach your core infrastructure.
Dramatically Boosting Application Performance
Speed is a feature, and an API proxy is one of the best tools for delivering it. One of its killer features is caching. The proxy can store copies of common, non-sensitive responses and serve them directly, meaning your backend servers don’t have to repeat the same work over and over again. This dramatically reduces latency and server load.
Imagine an e-commerce website where thousands of users are viewing the same product details every minute:
- Without a proxy: Every single request hits the database, consuming server resources and slowing things down for everyone.
- With a proxy: The first request fetches the data. The proxy then caches that response for a few minutes. The next 999+ requests immediately get the response from the cache, resulting in lightning-fast load times and a massive reduction in server load. This also helps during unexpected traffic spikes by serving cached content, maintaining responsiveness.
A actionable insight here is to identify your most-read, least-changing API endpoints (like /products/{id} or /categories) and configure caching rules specifically for them to achieve maximum performance gains with minimal effort. Beyond caching, proxies can also perform load balancing, distributing incoming traffic across multiple backend instances to prevent any single server from becoming a bottleneck, ensuring optimal resource utilization and responsiveness.
Gaining Unrivaled Observability and Insights
What cannot be measured cannot be improved. Understanding how your APIs are actually being used is critical for making informed business decisions, troubleshooting issues, and planning for growth. An API proxy provides a centralized platform for managing all your logging and analytics data. You no longer need to painstakingly piece together logs from a dozen different microservices; instead, you get a unified view of everything.
This centralized data is a goldmine. You can easily track key metrics such as:
- Most popular endpoints: Discover which features users truly love and use the most.
- Client API usage: See which partners or applications are generating the most traffic.
- Error rates and latencies: Quickly identify performance bottlenecks or problematic services before they escalate.
- Geographical traffic patterns: Understand where your users are accessing your services from around the world.
For example, by monitoring latency on the /checkout endpoint, you might discover that users in Asia are experiencing slower access. This actionable insight could lead you to deploy caching closer to their region, such as in a Singapore data center, directly improving their experience. These insights are invaluable for proactive problem-solving and strategic planning.
Streamlined API Evolution and Versioning
Changing APIs without breaking all the applications that depend on them is a perennial headache for developers. API proxy servers can make this entire process significantly smoother. They allow you to roll out new API versions while keeping older ones operational, all behind a single, consistent endpoint, minimizing disruption for your consumers.
For instance, you might deploy a v2 of your API that returns data in an entirely new format. You can configure the proxy to route requests with a ‘v2’ header to the new service, while all other traffic continues to flow to the stable v1 service. This provides your clients with ample time to upgrade on their own schedule, without experiencing any downtime or forced migrations. Proxies can also facilitate A/B testing, routing a small percentage of traffic to a new feature to gather data before a full rollout.
The proxy can even act as a translator. Suppose you have a legacy backend that only understands XML. Instead of an expensive, large-scale rewrite, you can place a proxy in front of it. The proxy can convert modern JSON requests into the backend’s expected XML and then translate the XML response back into JSON for the client. This offers a practical, phased approach to modernizing your systems without immediate, massive overhaul.
Solving Real-World Problems with API Proxy Servers
While the theory behind API proxy servers is robust, their true value becomes apparent when you see them tackle complex engineering challenges in the real world. It’s time to move beyond concepts and look at some battle-tested scenarios where the proxy isn’t just a “nice-to-have” feature but a critical piece of the puzzle, transforming chaos into order and bridging the gap between old and new technologies.
These examples demonstrate how a seemingly simple proxy can untangle complexity, connect disparate systems, and establish an impenetrable security barrier between your applications and the external world, making your architecture more robust and flexible.
Taming Microservices Complexity
Modern applications are rarely built as one giant monolithic entity anymore. Instead, they are often a collection of small, independent services that communicate with each other. While this microservices approach offers immense flexibility and scalability, it can quickly become a tangled mess for client applications trying to consume them.
Imagine a mobile app needing to communicate with a dozen different services, each with its own address, security rules, and data formats. This quickly becomes a developer’s nightmare, leading to tightly coupled client code and increased development overhead.
This is where the API proxy server, often evolving into what’s known as an API Gateway in this context, truly shines. It becomes the single, unified entry point for all incoming requests. The mobile app doesn’t need to know about the dozens of microservices running behind the scenes; it simply communicates with one address: the proxy. The proxy then intelligently routes each request to the correct internal service, whether it’s for user data, product inventory, or payment processing. This pattern simplifies client-side development and greatly enhances backend maintainability.
By creating a single entry point, the API proxy simplifies client-side code and decouples it from the backend architecture. You gain the freedom to add, remove, or refactor microservices without breaking user-facing applications. For a deeper understanding of this design, you can explore various microservices architecture patterns that define best practices for building such scalable systems.
Modernizing Legacy Systems Without Rewrites
Suppose your company operates a critical 20-year-old system that only supports the outdated SOAP protocol and cumbersome XML data. Your brand-new web application needs to fetch data from it, but it’s built on the modern REST protocol and expects clean JSON. A complete rewrite of the legacy system would cost millions and take years, an often unfeasible endeavor.
An API proxy server acts as a powerful translator, building a seamless bridge between these two disparate worlds. It enables gradual modernization, allowing you to introduce modern clients without overhauling existing infrastructure.
A practical example: you can configure the proxy to translate a GET /api/customer/123 request (a modern REST call) into the following SOAP/XML request before sending it to the legacy system:
123
When the old system replies in XML, the proxy translates it back into concise JSON before sending it to the new web application. This provides a non-disruptive, step-by-step path to modernization, preserving investment in stable legacy systems while allowing new applications to leverage them with modern interfaces.
Securely Integrating Third-Party APIs
Your applications likely rely on external services for functions like payment processing, shipping quotes, or social media logins. But every integration with a third-party API introduces potential risks. What if their service goes down? What if they experience a data breach? What if a bug in your code starts hammering their API, racking up huge unexpected charges?
Wrapping third-party APIs with your own proxy provides you with crucial control and protection over these external dependencies, effectively treating external services as if they were internal ones and applying your own policies.
This strategy allows you to enforce your own rules on how your application interacts with external services. You can implement several key safeguards:
- Rate Limiting: Protect your budget by setting a hard cap of 1,000 paid shipping API calls per day, preventing a runaway bug from costing you thousands of dollars in unexpected fees.
- Caching: Store shipping quotes for 5 minutes. This reduces costs, speeds up your checkout process, and even keeps things running smoothly if the shipping provider’s service experiences a temporary outage.
- Credential Security: Your API keys for third-party services are securely stored within the proxy, never exposed in client-side code where they could be stolen. The proxy handles the secure exchange with the third party on your behalf.
This pattern is especially useful for scraping public data or using APIs with strict usage quotas. For complex data collection, combining an API proxy with a robust IP network can be highly effective. For example, using residential proxies can provide the reliable and anonymous access needed for these tasks, ensuring data integrity and avoiding detection. You can find more details at https://www.ipfly.net/zh-tw/resident-proxy/.
API Proxy vs. Direct API Access: A Feature Comparison
The table below breaks down the key distinctions, highlighting how an API proxy adds layers of security, control, and flexibility that direct connections simply cannot achieve. It underscores the strategic advantages of centralizing API management rather than allowing direct, unmediated access to backend services.
| Feature | Direct API Access | Using an API Proxy Server |
|---|---|---|
| Security | Backend directly exposed to client traffic, increasing attack surface and making it vulnerable to various threats. | Shields backend systems from direct exposure; adds a crucial layer of threat detection, validation, and IP filtering. |
| Authentication | Each backend service must handle its own authentication and authorization logic, leading to redundancy and inconsistencies. | Centralizes authentication and authorization rules, applying them uniformly across all incoming API requests for enhanced security. |
| Rate Limiting | Must be implemented individually within each service, making global enforcement challenging and inconsistent across the system. | Enforces global rate limits and throttling policies to prevent abuse, protect backend services from overload, and ensure fair usage. |
| Caching | No centralized caching mechanism; caching logic must be handled by individual clients or within each service, often inefficiently. | Provides shared caching capabilities to reduce backend load, significantly improve response times, and lower operational costs. |
| Protocol Translation | Client and server must use the exact same communication protocol and data formats, limiting flexibility and modernization options. | Seamlessly translates between different protocols (e.g., REST to SOAP) and data formats (e.g., JSON to XML), bridging old and new systems. |
| Monitoring/Logging | Each service maintains separate, uncoordinated logs, making it difficult to gain a holistic view of API usage and performance. | Centralizes logging and monitoring of all API traffic, providing comprehensive insights into usage patterns, errors, and performance metrics. |
| Flexibility | Changes to backend services directly impact clients, requiring coordinated updates and increasing the risk of breaking existing integrations. | Decouples clients from backend implementations, allowing for easy changes, updates, or versioning of services without affecting consumers. |
As you can see, while the direct approach might seem simpler initially, it quickly becomes brittle and insecure as your system scales. An API proxy, on the other hand, provides the solid foundation necessary for building scalable, secure, and maintainable applications in the long run, essential for any growing digital product.
How to Choose and Implement Your First API Proxy
Moving from theory to practice is always the most exciting step. Choosing and deploying your first API proxy server doesn’t have to be a daunting task. If you break it down into clear stages – selecting the right tool, then following a straightforward plan – you can confidently get your proxy up and running, quickly realizing its benefits.
The true key lies in matching the solution to your specific needs. Consider your team’s technical capabilities, your budget constraints, and the anticipated future growth rate of your application. An informed decision at this stage will save significant time and resources down the line.
Comparing Your Options
Not all API proxy solutions are built the same. They generally fall into three main categories, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Understanding these differences is the first crucial step in making an informed choice that aligns with your operational requirements and strategic goals.
- Cloud-Native Gateways (e.g., AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management): These are fully managed services provided by major cloud vendors. They are incredibly practical for teams looking to move fast and avoid the complexities of infrastructure management. You get out-of-the-box scalability, security features, and intuitive user interfaces. However, they can lead to vendor lock-in, and costs can escalate quickly as traffic grows, so careful monitoring is advised.
- Self-Hosted Open-Source Tools (e.g., NGINX, Apache APISIX, Kong Gateway): If your team has strong DevOps skills, self-hosting an open-source proxy offers maximum control and flexibility. You can fine-tune every aspect of the configuration on your own servers, tailoring it precisely to your unique needs. This freedom, however, comes with greater responsibility – your team will need to handle everything from installation and configuration to maintenance, scaling, and security patching.
- Dedicated API Management Platforms (e.g., Apigee, Mulesoft): These are specialized commercial products that bundle powerful API proxy capabilities with a full suite of API management tools. They often feature advanced functionalities like developer portals, deep analytics, monetization options, and comprehensive lifecycle management, making them ideal for enterprises where APIs are a core product offering or revenue stream.
The best choice often lies in the trade-off between convenience and control. Managed services offer a faster ramp-up and reduced operational burden, while self-hosted solutions provide maximum customization and long-term cost control for high-volume scenarios.
Advanced Implementation Checklist
Once you’ve identified the right tool, the implementation process can be streamlined into several logical steps. You can view this checklist as a roadmap, guiding you from the initial planning stages all the way to having a fully operational and monitored API proxy server. Following these steps systematically will ensure a robust and effective deployment.
- Step 1: Define Your Strategy Before writing any code, outline your core requirements. What are your security rules (e.g., “all partner traffic requires an API key”)? Which rate limits will you enforce (e.g., “100 requests per minute per user”)? Which backend service should each URL path point to (e.g.,
/users/*goes to the user service)? Clearly defining these answers upfront will make the actual configuration work much smoother and prevent costly reworks. - Step 2: Configure Your First Endpoint Start small. Pick a single, simple API endpoint and configure the proxy server to route traffic to it. This essentially tells the proxy: “When a request for
/api/userscomes in, send it to the user service backend located athttp://10.0.1.23:8080.” Test this basic routing thoroughly to ensure connectivity. - Step 3: Apply Security and Traffic Rules Once your initial endpoint routing is working, begin applying the strategies you defined earlier. In your proxy’s dashboard or configuration files, enable API key validation and set up that 100 requests/minute rate limit. Just like that, you’ve added a crucial layer of protection around your backend service, significantly enhancing its resilience and security profile.
- Step 4: Test and Validate This step is paramount. Use tools like
curlor Postman to rigorously test your proxy endpoint. First, send a request with a valid API key to ensure you get a200 OKresponse. Next, send a request without a key to confirm you receive a401 Unauthorizederror. Finally, run a script to send 110 requests within a minute and verify that you receive a429 Too Many Requestserror, confirming your rate limits are active. - Step 5: Set Up Monitoring and Logging The final step is to enable robust logging and monitoring. Your API proxy server will generate a wealth of valuable data about traffic patterns, error rates, and response times. Capturing this information is essential for troubleshooting issues, understanding API usage patterns, identifying performance bottlenecks, and making data-driven decisions about future API development and scaling. Integrate it with your existing observability stack.
Effectively implementing an API proxy server involves more than just technical setup; it demands a broader strategic approach. To deepen your knowledge, you can find vital guidance on API management best practices, which provide valuable context for making such strategic decisions. Crucially, ensuring the proxy seamlessly integrates with your existing systems is paramount; you can explore different methods to streamline proxy integration and boost the overall efficiency of the process.
Answering Common Questions About API Proxy Servers
As you delve into the world of API proxy servers, a few common questions invariably arise. Let’s address these with practical, straightforward answers to help you move forward with confidence and a clearer understanding of this essential component in modern API architecture.
API Proxy vs. API Gateway: What’s the Difference?
You can think of an API proxy as a foundational building block, and an API Gateway as a fully-featured “house” built upon it. A basic proxy is a simple intermediary, whose primary job is to forward requests. It focuses mainly on routing, basic security like authentication, and sometimes caching.
An API Gateway does all of that and much more. It’s a comprehensive management toolkit, offering advanced security features like OAuth and JWT integration, monetization capabilities, developer portals for external consumption, deep analytics, versioning management, and protocol transformation. Essentially, an API Gateway provides a centralized platform for managing the entire lifecycle of your APIs.
In short, all gateways utilize proxying, but not all proxies are gateways. If you primarily need simple routing and caching, a basic proxy might suffice. If you’re building a full-fledged API product for multiple consumers with complex requirements, an API Gateway is the more appropriate and comprehensive solution.
Can a Proxy Really Improve Performance?
Absolutely. An API proxy server can significantly boost your application’s speed in two key ways. First, through caching, it can store and serve frequently requested data without bothering your backend. This drastically reduces response times for users, especially for static or rarely changing data.
Second, it can implement load balancing by intelligently distributing incoming traffic across multiple backend servers. This prevents any single server from becoming overloaded, keeping your application fast and reliable even during peak traffic. While any intermediary technically adds a tiny bit of network latency, the performance gains from caching and intelligent routing almost always result in a net significant speed increase for the end-user, often making the application feel much snappier.
How Hard is it to Set Up an API Proxy?
The difficulty level largely depends on the path you choose. Managed cloud services like AWS API Gateway or Azure API Management come with user-friendly dashboards that make setup relatively straightforward, even if you don’t have extensive server experience. Often, you can configure a simple proxy route in under 30 minutes, allowing you to quickly get started with basic functionalities.
On the other hand, setting up an open-source tool like NGINX or Kong Gateway yourself requires more hands-on configuration and technical knowledge of server environments. You’ll be responsible for installation, configuration files, and ongoing maintenance. For most teams, especially those just starting, a managed solution is the quickest and easiest way to get up and running. If you have more questions, you can delve deeper by browsing our detailed API proxy FAQ section.
Does a Proxy Add Latency to My Requests?
This is a common concern, but the reality is that the benefits almost always far outweigh the minimal processing delay added by a proxy. The time saved by serving responses from a local cache or by efficiently routing traffic to an optimal backend instance significantly surpasses the tiny amount of time the proxy itself adds to the request path. For example, a request to the backend might take 200 milliseconds. The proxy server might add an additional 5 milliseconds of overhead. But if the response is cached, the total time is only 5 milliseconds instead of 200 milliseconds – a substantial improvement in user experience.
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