Stack category
Open-Source Load Balancers & Reverse Proxies
The reverse proxy is the gatekeeper in front of your application: it terminates TLS, load-balances across your servers, caches, and shields the app from the raw internet.
Why this layer matters for sovereignty
This layer sees every request and its TLS session — logging settings here define most of your network-side GDPR surface.
It's the layer where certificates live: automated HTTPS (ACME) has removed what used to be the hardest ops chore.
Open-source proxies are mature, boring infrastructure: no vendor to depend on, and configs that survive a decade of product changes.
What to look for
Automatic certificate management (ACME/Let's Encrypt) — manual renewal is an outage waiting to happen.
Load-balancing health checks so a dead backend never receives traffic.
Service discovery integration (Docker, Kubernetes) if you run containers.
Caching capability for content-heavy sites; it can remove the need for a separate CDN at small scale.
European & open-source networking & proxy providers
Curated as part of the European Stack Builder. Badges reflect the organization's origin — EU, EEA, EFTA, and UK count as European.
Extensible web server and reverse proxy with automatic HTTPS
High-performance HTTP accelerator for content-heavy applications
Frequently asked questions
What is a reverse proxy?
A reverse proxy sits in front of your application servers and forwards client requests to them. It terminates TLS, distributes requests across backends (load balancing), can cache responses, and hides your application's real network topology from the internet.
What is the difference between a load balancer and a reverse proxy?
A reverse proxy forwards requests to one or more backends; a load balancer distributes requests across multiple backends. In practice most modern tools — Traefik, HAProxy, Caddy, Nginx — do both at once, which is why the layer here is called Networking & Proxy.
Nginx, Traefik, Caddy, or HAProxy?
Caddy for the simplest possible setup with automatic HTTPS, Traefik in container environments with dynamic service discovery, HAProxy when raw load-balancing performance and TCP routing matter, and Nginx when you need its mature ecosystem of modules, caching rules, and battle-tested configurations. Varnish is a specialist for full-page caching of content-heavy sites.
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