Load balancing with Pound

Paras Nath Chaudhary · January 8, 2020

Linux

Pound is a reverse-proxy load balancing server. It accepts requests from HTTP/HTTPS clients and distributes them to one or more Web servers. The HTTPS requests are decrypted and passed to the back-ends as plain HTTP. If more than one back-end server is defined, Pound chooses one of them randomly, based on defined priorities. By default, Pound keeps track of associations between clients and back-end servers (sessions).

Pound can be installed in CentOS with the following command:

# yum install epel-release -y
# yum install Pound -y

Pound can be then configured by editing the file /etc/pound.cfg In case you are using ubuntu, you can install with the following command:

# apt-get install pound

Then edit the configuration file /etc/pound/pound.cfg

You can find an example use of Load Balancing with Pound here. The example uses two NGINX server as backend and uses CentOS with Pound for the reverse-proxy load balancing. The very basic configuration used is as:

Daemon 0

ListenHTTP
    Address 172.20.18.4
    Port 80
End


Service
    BackEnd
        Address 172.20.18.2
        Port    80
    End

    BackEnd
        Address 172.20.18.3
        Port    80
    End
End

You can find an example use of Pound using docker at this link.

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