Designing Reliable Webhooks

When your application needs to notify external services about an event, webhooks are the industry standard. However, firing off an HTTP request and forgetting about it is a recipe for disaster.

• Implement an exponential backoff retry strategy. If the receiving server is down, your system should automatically attempt to resend the payload at increasing intervals.
• Always sign your webhook payloads using an HMAC secret. This allows the receiver to cryptographically verify that the request originated from your servers and hasn’t been tampered with.
• Maintain an audit log of all outbound webhooks, including request and response payloads, to simplify debugging when third-party integrations fail.