A customer upgrades their plan. Your billing system updates. But Slack doesn't know. Your CRM doesn't know. Your support team finds out when the customer complains they still see the old limits.
You're manually copying data between systems. Or running sync jobs every hour. Meanwhile, customers wait.
The moment something happens, every system that cares should know instantly.
FOUNDATIONAL - Real-time integrations depend on your system being able to push updates out.
Outbound webhooks are HTTP requests your system sends to external URLs when specific events occur. Customer signs up? POST to Slack. Order ships? POST to your fulfillment partner. Payment fails? POST to your alerting system.
Instead of external systems polling you constantly asking 'anything new?', you tell them the moment something changes. They register a URL with you, you call it when events happen. Simple, fast, real-time.
Every integration that needs to react to your events in real-time depends on outbound webhooks. It's how your system participates in a connected ecosystem.
Outbound webhooks solve a universal problem: how do you notify external systems about events without them constantly asking you?
When an event occurs, serialize the relevant data, POST it to registered URLs, handle failures gracefully. The receiver doesn't need to poll. They get pushed updates the moment things happen.
Trigger a "Customer Upgraded" event. Watch four webhooks fire. Compare sync vs async.
Send immediately when event occurs
Event happens, you immediately POST to the webhook URL before responding to the original request. Simple to implement. But if the webhook endpoint is slow or down, your whole operation waits.
Enqueue events, deliver asynchronously
Event happens, you push to a queue, respond immediately. A background worker picks up queued webhooks and delivers them. Failed deliveries get retried automatically.
One event triggers multiple webhooks
Single event needs to notify multiple subscribers. Customer signs up? Notify CRM, email system, analytics, and Slack. Each destination is independent - one failure doesn't affect others.
A customer upgrades from Basic to Pro. Your billing system processes it. Within seconds, Slack celebrates, CRM updates the account tier, support sees the new limits, and analytics tracks the conversion. No manual updates. No sync delays.
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Customer clicks 'Place Order'. Your code sends webhooks to 5 systems before responding. One is slow. Customer stares at a spinner for 30 seconds. Or times out entirely.
Instead: Queue webhook deliveries. Respond to the user immediately, deliver webhooks in the background.
Webhook endpoint returns 500. You log it and move on. The receiving system never gets the data. Now their records are out of sync and nobody knows why.
Instead: Implement exponential backoff retries. Try again in 1 min, 5 min, 30 min. Alert after repeated failures.
You send customer data to a webhook URL. Anyone who guesses the URL pattern can register their own endpoint and receive your customer data. You just created a data leak.
Instead: Sign payloads with HMAC. Include a signature header. Receivers verify the signature before trusting the data.
You've learned how your system can push real-time updates to external services. The natural complement is understanding how to receive webhooks from other systems.