Reliability & Resilience

Webhooks fail. Networks are unreliable, servers go down, and deployments cause outages. These guides cover the patterns and strategies for building webhook systems that handle failure gracefully.

📄️ Webhook Retry Strategies

Webhooks fail. Networks are unreliable, servers go down, deployments cause brief outages. A webhook system without retries would lose events constantly. But retries done wrong can overwhelm recovering servers, waste resources on permanently broken endpoints, and create confusing duplicate deliveries.

📄️ Idempotency and Deduplication

Webhooks get delivered more than once. Network timeouts, server restarts, and retry logic all conspire to send you the same event multiple times. If your handler charges a customer, sends an email, or updates inventory, processing a duplicate can cause real problems.

📄️ Webhook Timeout Best Practices

Webhook providers expect a fast response. When your endpoint takes too long, the provider assumes something went wrong and retries the delivery. This creates duplicate events, wastes resources on both sides, and can snowball into a backlog that takes hours to clear.

📄️ Webhook Delivery Guarantees

When a webhook provider promises to deliver events to your endpoint, what exactly are they promising? The answer varies significantly between providers and has real implications for how you build your consumer. Some guarantee every event reaches you at least once. Others guarantee events arrive at most once. A few attempt to guarantee exactly once delivery.

📄️ Dead Letter Queues for Webhooks

Webhooks fail. Endpoints go down, networks partition, and servers crash. A good retry strategy handles temporary failures, but some webhooks never succeed no matter how many times you retry. Without a plan for these permanent failures, events disappear silently and data gets lost.

📄️ Circuit Breakers for Webhook Delivery

When a webhook endpoint goes down, naive retry logic keeps hammering it with requests. Each attempt fails, consumes resources, and delays other deliveries. The endpoint's owners might be trying to bring their server back up while your retries add load. Your queue backs up as failing requests block the workers.