How API Design Prevents Webhook Overload
from The API Podcast with Fexingo: REST, GraphQL, and Modern Web APIs Hosted by Fexingo
In this episode of The API Podcast, Lucas and Luna dive into a pervasive problem: webhooks that fire too much and overwhelm their consumers. They start with a real-world failure — a payment processor that pounded a merchant's endpoint with redundant notifications — and unpack the design flaws behind it. Lucas explains why webhook delivery should include idempotency, why senders need to honor retry-after headers and exponential backoff, and how consumer-side circuit breakers can stop a bad sender from taking down an entire service. Luna brings in a story about a weather API that learned to batch alerts and a delivery service that trimmed its webhook payload by eighty percent after a versioning overhaul. Together they map out a short checklist every API team should run before shipping a webhook: idempotency keys, stable event ordering, explicit retry policies, and a clear contract for delivery attempts. The episode closes with a practical question for listeners building webhook consumers: what does your failure mode look like when the sender goes rogue? #API #Webhooks #API Design #Backend #DeveloperTools #EventDriven #SystemDesign #Reliability #Idempotency #RetryStrategy #CircuitBreaker #PayloadOptimization #Tech #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #APIPodcast #WebDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo
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