webhook-design

Webhook payload signing with HMAC-SHA256 ensures message integrity and authenticity by generating a cryptographic signature over the payload body. Receivers validate this signature against their shared secret to verify the webhook sender.

The best way to handle webhook retry policies is by implementing exponential backoff for failed deliveries. This approach systematically increases the delay between retry attempts, ensuring reliable event notification without overwhelming the receiving service.

To ensure idempotency in an event-driven webhook system, you should use unique event IDs for every notification. This allows receiving services to track processed events and gracefully discard duplicate webhook deliveries without causing data corruption.

You need a dead-letter queue for webhook delivery when a receiving service remains unavailable after all retry attempts with exponential backoff are exhausted. It captures failed events to prevent data loss and enable manual processing.

Managing webhook secret rotation and payload versioning involves providing specific patterns for registration APIs. This allows you to securely update shared secrets over time and version payloads to maintain backward compatibility as your event-driven API evolves.