Sweet Baby

Also known as “reverse proxy caches” or “surrogate caches,” gateway caches are also intermediaries, but instead of being deployed by network administrators to save bandwidth, they’re typically deployed by Webmasters themselves, to make their sites more scalable, reliable and better performing.

Requests can be routed to gateway caches by a number of methods, but typically some form of load balancer is used to make one or more of them look like the origin server to clients.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) distribute gateway caches throughout the Internet (or a part of it) and sell caching to interested Web sites. Speedera and Akamai are examples of CDNs.

This tutorial focuses mostly on browser and proxy caches, although some of the information is suitable for those interested in gateway caches as well.