Pound is a reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end
for Web servers. It was developed to provide for even distribution of
load between backend httpd servers and to allow for a convenient SSL
wrapper for those servers that do not offer it natively.
The core principles of its design are simplicity and safety.
Pound is a very small program, easily audited for security
problems. Normally it runs as a non-privileged user, and can
optionally be run in a chrooted environment. With several exceptions,
it does not access the hard disk during its runtime. In short, it
should pose no security threat to the server it runs at.
The original version of pound was written by Robert Segall at
Apsis
GmbH1. In
2018, I added support for newer OpenSSL to the
then current version of the program (2.8). This version of
pound, hosted on github was further modified by
Rick O’Sullivan and Frank Schmirler, who added WebSocket support.
On April 2020, Apsis started development of pound 3.0 –
essentially an attempt to rewrite program from scratch, introducing
dependencies on some third-party software.
On 2022-09-19, the development and maintenance of pound was
officially discontinued and Apsis GmbH was dissolved. Following that,
I decided to continue development of the program taking my fork as a
base. I considered the branch 3.0, which emerged for a short time
before the original project was abandoned, to be a failed experiment.
To ensure consistent versioning and avoid confusion, my versioning of
pound started at number 4.0.