Pound

Pound has been around for decades as a no-fuss reverse proxy that just works. It was originally developed by Apsis GmbH, a Swiss company, and remains a solid option for distributing traffic across multiple backend servers. The core job is simple: listen on a port, accept requests, and forward them to a pool of servers based on your rules. It handles SSL/TLS termination without much ceremony, supporting client certificates and modern cipher suites. Session persistence is built in with cookies or client IP tracking. The configuration file uses a clean block syntax that is easy to read, especially compared to some heavier proxies. Pound runs as a single process with very low memory overhead. It does not support HTTP/2 or dynamic reconfiguration without a restart. Those are tradeoffs for its minimalism. The project has not seen active development in recent years, though the source code remains freely available under the GPL. If you need a dedicated, hardened proxy for a legacy stack or a resource constrained environment, Pound is worth a look. For modern microservices or Kubernetes setups, you would likely pick something else.