[dvhh]

the HTTP/2 part could probably be handled via a reverse proxy

[KirinDave]

You lose out bigtime between your revproxy and your backends. You might as well abandon it entirely and go with grpc streaming or thrift.

Revproxies are essentially awful, ugly lynchpins in your distributed architecture. You want to be as low as you can afford to be on utilization for them, because if they have a bad day you have no product.

[dig1]

You will end up with proxy anyway. Don't tell me you expose your web apps to the public without any frontend protection?

[dvhh]

Even without thinking about protection, load balancing and/or redundancy is also of the vital to high performance application.

[KirinDave]

I didn't say you wouldn't have a proxy. I said you want to have as few as you possibly can for volume and redundancy, because they're a centralized point of failure in your architecture and they have to scale over your entire infrastructure.

I am certainly NOT advocating for their lack. I'm not even sure how that could realistically work.

[quickthrower2]

You can use just Nginx as a web server right? Used to do this when learning ruby. Not for prod code mind you.