Taking Advantage of Increasingly Popular Webhooks

Webhooks are an increasingly popular alternative to polling APIs, allowing developers to receive real-time notifications about changes in a system without having to constantly check for updates. They eliminate the need for complex code and overhead associated with polling, making them simpler and more efficient to use. Common use cases include ecommerce platforms like Shopify, CI/CD tools such as GitHub, communication services like Twilio, and identity management systems like Okta. While webhooks offer many benefits, challenges can arise in handling spikes of incoming requests, error handling, debugging, and fanning out webhooks to multiple endpoints. Solutions to these problems include implementing queuing systems, creating separate ingest points for failed requests, developing tooling for payload analysis, and using a fan-out pattern with retry logic.