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Backend Engineering/Learn/Webhooks

Webhooks

Inbound HTTP you do not control: signature verification on the raw payload, duplicate delivery as the normal case, and ordering you cannot assume.

Inbound Webhooks

A third party calls your API on its schedule, with its retry policy, and treats your endpoint as infrastructure it depends on.

Q · What changes when an external service is the client and your backend is the server it calls?
Webhook Signature Verification

Proving the request came from the provider — computed over the raw bytes, compared in constant time, bounded by a timestamp.

Q · How do I know this webhook actually came from the provider and not from anyone who guessed the URL?
Webhook Idempotency

Providers retry, so duplicate delivery is the normal case — deduplicate on the provider event id, atomically.

Q · The provider sent the same event three times. How do I make sure the customer is charged, emailed and shipped once?
Webhook Retries and Ordering

The provider decides when to retry and does not promise order, so your handler must be correct for events that arrive late, twice, or backwards.

Q · What must my handler assume about when webhooks arrive and in what order?
Outbound Webhooks

When you are the provider: delivering to endpoints you do not control, without letting a slow customer take down your service.

Q · How do I deliver events to my customers' endpoints without their failures becoming mine?
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