Why Kafka Might Be an Overkill for Your Webhooks

Webhooks are events that require asynchronous processing, typically handled by message queues like Apache Kafka. However, using Kafka for webhooks may be an overkill due to its costs and complexity. While Kafka's capacity and performance can be tempting, other factors lead to the costs outweighing the benefits. These include high latency, network failure, server shutdown, buggy releases, and more. To implement webhook processing reliably through asynchronous processing, several requirements must be met, such as a producer runtime for adding messages to a message queue, a consumer runtime for processing webhooks, a retry mechanism for failed webhooks, rate-limiting component, instrumentation, visualizations, and fault tolerance. Kafka's design is lean in responsibility, requiring developers to handle various tasks like retries, monitoring, setting up alerts, and more. This can be overwhelming for simple use cases like webhook communication. Additionally, Kafka setup costs include expertise required, person-hours needed, infrastructure costs, and operational and maintenance costs. In conclusion, while it is possible to implement Kafka for webhooks, the benefits come at a cost of complexity that may not be worth it for most teams working with webhooks who want quick integration with third-party SaaS applications.