Webhooks are easy until they scale
Without rules, you get duplicates, missing events and support chaos. The solution is delivery discipline.
1) Signing and verification
- HMAC signatures and timestamp checks.
- Rate limits and basic abuse protection.
2) Retries and backoff
- Exponential backoff + jitter.
- Dead‑letter after N attempts with reason.
3) Queue between delivery and business logic
- Fast ACK to reduce timeouts.
- Async processing to control load.
4) Deduplication and ordering
- Unique eventId + idempotent handlers.
- Expect out‑of‑order events and design accordingly.
Summary
Reliable webhooks require signing, retries, queues and a delivery log — then event integrations become predictable.