webhook-architecture

To prevent duplicate webhook processing, implement idempotent receivers that mark provider event IDs as received before processing, ensuring events are processed exactly once even when platforms retry deliveries for 72 hours.

HMAC signature verification authenticates incoming webhook deliveries using timing-safe comparisons to validate provider headers, preventing spoofed events from platforms like Shopify or Stripe from being processed by your endpoint.

The best way to handle failed webhook deliveries is using an outbox pattern with an exponential backoff retry schedule (1m, 5m, 30m, 2h, 8h) and promoting undeliverable events to a dead-letter queue with alerting.

Yes, this webhook architecture supports replay protection through HMAC verification and provides operational tooling for dead-letter queue promotion with alerting and replay functionality to recover missed deliveries.

Yes, you can use the outbox pattern for sending webhooks with custom event-driven services, utilizing a poller with SKIP-LOCKED-friendly polling and exponential backoff retries to guarantee reliable outbound delivery.

You need a dead-letter queue to surface unrecoverable webhook delivery failures for human intervention, preventing lost orders and operational toil when automatic retries exhaust the exponential backoff schedule.