[Zope] ANNOUNCE: Pound - reverse proxy and load balancer

Robert Segall roseg@apsis.ch
Sat, 25 May 2002 15:58:55 +0200


For a long time I have been bothered by a few problems concerning the 
infrastructure around Zope:

- load balancing: Zope/ZEO is a great combination, but load balancing between 
several servers on a heavily-loaded site is expensive (read: commercial, 
hardware-based boxes) or problematic (round-robin DNS may not be available
to everybody and keeping sessions is iffy).
- SSL: m2crypto is a nice package but I had a few problems with it. Apache 
mod_ssl/mod_proxy is great, but a bit overkill from my point of view.

As a result I wrote Pound: it is a load balancer (it will distribute the load 
between several back-end servers, while keeping track of sessions) and an SSL 
wrapper (it accepts HTTPS requests, decrypts them and passes them as plain 
HTTP).

For further information, download, etc. please see http://www.apsis.ch/pound

The software is at version 0.1 - alpha quality. It works for me... Further 
testing (especially under heavy loads), improvements and bug (what bugs ?) 
fixes are welcome.

Pound is distributed under the GPL.

Enjoy and let me know how it works for you.
-- 
Robert Segall
Apsis GmbH
Postfach, Uetikon am See, CH-8707
Tel: +41-1-920 4904