NAT Load Balancer
Learned in SE464.
One of two main types of load balancer (the other is a reverse proxy).
NAT (Network Address Translation) load balancer works at the TCP/IP layer.
Key difference from Reverse Proxy
- NAT forwards packets one-by-one, but remembers which server was assigned to each client.
- Reverse proxies store the full request/response before forwarding.
Because NAT works at the IP layer, it’s typically faster than a reverse proxy but has fewer high-level features (no content-based routing, SSL termination is harder, etc.).