Pound is a lightweight

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

reverse proxy In computer networks, a reverse proxy is the application that sits in front of back-end applications and forwards client (e.g. browser) requests to those applications. Reverse proxies help increase scalability, performance, resilience and securi ...

program and

application firewall An application firewall is a form of firewall that controls input/output or system calls of an application or service. It operates by monitoring and blocking communications based on a configured policy, generally with predefined rule sets to ...

suitable to be used as a

web server A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initi ...

load balancing solution. Developed by an IT security company, it has a strong emphasis on security. The original intent on developing Pound was to allow distributing the load among several

Zope Zope is a family of free and open-source web application servers written in Python, and their associated online community. Zope stands for "Z Object Publishing Environment", and was the first system using the now common object publishing method ...

servers running on top of ZEO (Zope Extensible Object). However, Pound is not limited to Zope-based installations. Using

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...

matching on the requested

URL A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifi ...

s, Pound can pass different kinds of requests to different backend server groups. A few more of its most important features: * detects when a backend server fails or recovers, and bases its load balancing decisions on this information: if a backend server fails, it will not receive requests until it recovers * decrypts

requests to Hypertext Transfer Protocol, http ones *

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. I ...

support * can load balance from IPv6 clients to IPv4 servers and vice versa * rejects incorrect requests * can be used in a

chroot A chroot on Unix and Unix-like operating systems is an operation that changes the apparent root directory for the current running process and its children. A program that is run in such a modified environment cannot name (and therefore normall ...

environment * has no special requirements concerning which web server software or browser to use * supports virtual hosts *

Server Name Indication Server Name Indication (SNI) is an extension to the Transport Layer Security (TLS) computer networking protocol by which a client indicates which hostname it is attempting to connect to at the start of the handshaking process. This allows a server ...

(SNI) for SSL/TLS certificate negotiation * configurable Pound is distributed under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

and can be used free of charge even in business environments.

References

External links

Pound website

Pound mailing list archive

* Web archive
Pound Best Practice Deployment
* {{Cite web, url=https://debian-administration.org/article/249/Simple_webserver_load_balancing_with_pound, title=Simple webserver load balancing with pound, last=, first=, date=20 Sep 2005, website=debian-administration.org, url-status=live, archive-url=, archive-date=, access-date=2019-11-06 Free network-related software Unix network-related software Reverse proxy

See also

References

External links