What is “Reverse Proxy” and “Load Balancing” in Nginx / Web server terms?

Question

These are two phrases I hear about very often, mainly associated with Nginx. Can someone give me a laymans defintion?

Answer 1

I see both of them as a functionality of a HTTP/Web Server.

Load balancer’s job is to distribute the workload between servers node in a way that makes the best use of it.

Reverse proxy is a interface for external world ,forwarding request to a server node (even when we have a single node) Its other use cases are caching of static content ,compression etc