December 2022 Summaries

Convoy v0.8 introduces a range of new features and improvements designed to streamline and enhance user experience, including Subscriptions Filtering, Portal Links, and a simpler Events Dashboard and Events Log. The update deprecates the concept of applications, simplifying the integration process by allowing users to directly create endpoints and send events, with a focus on backward compatibility to avoid downtime. Subscriptions Filtering allows webhook consumers to filter events based on payload structure, supporting both simple and complex filters. Portal Links replace the obsolete app portal, offering a flexible way to create customer-facing dashboards. The update also introduces a new fan-out mechanism, utilizing endpoints and owner_id fields for grouping, and adds support for static IPs by routing webhooks through a dedicated proxy. Looking ahead, Convoy v0.9 is set to include features for ingesting events from pub/sub systems like Kafka, Amazon SQS, and Google PubSub, alongside other improvements.

PagerDuty V3 Webhooks represent an advanced system for delivering webhooks, offering specific features that include subscription to event types and services, teams, or accounts, thereby reducing unnecessary data processing for consumers. The system supports zero downtime key rotation and custom headers to meet endpoint security and authentication requirements. Convoy, an open-source webhook delivery infrastructure, is presented as a platform capable of replicating the features of PagerDuty V3 Webhooks, allowing for rapid deployment and scalability. The article guides users through creating projects, endpoints, and subscriptions within Convoy, demonstrating the implementation of key features like event subscription and secrets rotation, thus showcasing Convoy's potential to deliver custom headers and manage webhook delivery efficiently.

Webhooks are automated messages sent from an application after certain operations to facilitate communication between services, such as notifying an e-commerce application after a payment operation. The text explains how Convoy can be leveraged to send webhook events reliably from an application to clients, using a tutorial on building a Todo API with Express. The API project involves creating, updating, and deleting Todo items, each triggering webhook events for those operations. It outlines setting up endpoints and Todo APIs, the process for creating and managing endpoints, and how to send webhook events using Convoy. The tutorial demonstrates how to publish webhook events via a series of API operations, including creating and updating Todo items, and emphasizes best practices for managing endpoints and event publishing in a production environment. Convoy's functionality allows sending webhooks to single or multiple endpoints, and the guide encourages users to experiment with the setup and provide feedback.

The article provides a comprehensive guide on implementing webhooks using the Convoy service in a Go-based Todo API developed with the Gin HTTP Router Library. Webhooks are described as messages sent from an application after an operation, often used for communication between services, such as a payment provider sending events to an e-commerce application. The guide explains the process of setting up the API and Convoy to generate and send webhook events for operations on Todo items, including creating, updating, and deleting, with specific event types like "todo.created," "todo.updated," and "todo.deleted." The article includes detailed code examples and instructions for building the API, managing endpoints, and publishing webhook events, emphasizing best practices for production environments, such as scoping endpoints to users and using workers for event publication.

The text provides an overview of the importance of verifying the source IP of webhook requests to ensure security for internal services and API consumers, highlighting how this practice helps prevent unauthorized access and potential attacks like man-in-the-middle. It discusses different setups for sending webhooks, such as using single or multiple servers, and emphasizes the role of headers like X-Forwarded-For in identifying client IP addresses. The text also introduces forward proxies as intermediaries that enhance security by hiding IP addresses and preventing attacks like Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF). Additionally, it explains configuring Convoy, a server that sends outbound requests, with a forward proxy using a tool called Smokescreen, and provides a practical guide on setting up static IP addresses for API providers, emphasizing scalability for production usage.

In November, Convoy introduced several significant updates, including new subscription filtering capabilities that allow webhook consumers to filter events based on payload, thereby enhancing user customization with simple and complex filters. The company also deprecated the concept of applications to streamline integration, which led to the introduction of Portal Links for creating customer-facing dashboards and a more user-friendly events dashboard and event log. Additionally, Convoy launched new Cloud pricing plans, effective January 2023, and provided several tutorials on using different frameworks like Rails, FastAPI, Flask, and Laravel to send webhook events. The company emphasized improvements in debugging webhook events with Convoy CLI and handling webhook failure notifications, encouraging users to explore these new features and stay updated via GitHub and Twitter.

The text outlines the use of webhooks for communication between applications, specifically detailing how Convoy can be implemented to send webhook events from a Laravel-based Todo API to clients. Webhooks are described as messages sent after certain operations, such as creating, updating, or deleting a Todo item, which then trigger the corresponding webhook events. The guide walks through setting up a Laravel project, configuring endpoints, and sending webhook events using Convoy, emphasizing the importance of tailoring endpoints to specific users or businesses in production environments. The process includes creating endpoints, generating webhook events for Todo operations, and managing these events via a delivery dashboard, with a recommendation to publish webhooks from workers in production rather than directly from controllers.

In Convoy, subscriptions are essential for routing events from a source to a destination endpoint, and they offer flexibility through features like retry strategies, alert configurations, and circuit breaker triggers for handling errors. Subscription filters enhance this capability by allowing events to be conditionally delivered based on specific payload values using a subset of MongoDB's Extended JSON v2, enabling granular control over which events reach particular endpoints. This is particularly useful for managing webhooks, as it allows for intelligent routing of events by matching specific criteria such as amount or provider fields. By utilizing these filters, Convoy users can ensure that only relevant data is sent to endpoints or that events are distributed to different endpoints according to their content. These filters are available on Convoy Cloud and will be included in the upcoming v0.8 release, offering an intuitive way to manage event routing without embedding complex logic into applications, and users are encouraged to try out these features and provide feedback through the platform's community channels.