Exposing pools of machines to clients, or routing network traffic via an intermediary, are common techniques in distributed computing, and large networks. Network Address Translation, forward proxies, and reverse proxies, are three common techniques for managing network traffic at scale. However, I've always found each of these topics to be somewhat mystical, and I've never understood the fundamentals of how each technique works. This blog post will attempt to distil each idea into its simplest form, and write a code example where possible.