June 2023 Summaries

On the fifth day of Convoy Launch week, two innovative features have been introduced: Access Control and Advanced Portal Links, aimed at enhancing user experience and productivity. Access Control now allows for Role-Based Access Control, providing enterprise and cloud users the ability to assign specific roles—super_user, admin, or member—to team members, thereby securing and streamlining access to Convoy projects and dashboards based on individual responsibilities. Advanced Portal Links have been enhanced to allow engineers not only to review event logs and retry deliveries but also to edit or create endpoints, thanks to a new opt-in setting. This new flexibility minimizes communication delays and empowers teams to manage and adjust endpoints more efficiently, promoting agility and collaboration. The intuitive design of these features ensures ease of use, even for those new to portal links, significantly boosting team productivity and event management capabilities.

Maple Billing is an end-to-end billing workflow product that combines the functionalities of Stripe, Baremetrics, and Docusign, offering automation and tools for engineering, product, sales, and revenue teams with minimal coding. The co-founder, Aswinkumar Rajendiran, emphasizes the importance of notifications in their business operations, utilizing webhooks to keep customers informed about various events, such as new subscriptions or changes in subscription plans. Initially, Maple Billing considered building their own webhook implementation but decided to integrate Convoy, an open-source webhook gateway, after migrating their datastore to PostgreSQL, which provided better support and scalability compared to MongoDB. The integration with Convoy has improved their developer experience, allowing them to recommend it to their customers for seamless receipt of webhooks, enhancing overall operational efficiency.

Convoy has unveiled two new features, On-The-Fly events and Meta events, designed to enhance the webhook experience by simplifying integration and offering operational insights. On-The-Fly events streamline the process by allowing endpoint information to be specified in a single API call alongside the event payload, automatically creating or updating endpoints and subscriptions, which is particularly beneficial in dynamic environments. Meta events provide notifications for specific activities within a Convoy project, allowing users to subscribe to these events and integrate them into their internal systems for a seamless experience. These features are optional and can be configured under Project settings to receive notifications via a provided webhook URL. Convoy plans to expand these functionalities based on user feedback, including enabling delivery via additional channels like Pub/Sub platforms.

Nohooks.io is a newly launched tool designed to provide webhook functionality on platforms that lack native support, such as DigitalOcean, Notion, and Render. It allows developers to receive real-time updates from these applications by acting as an intelligent polling system that checks for changes via public APIs and generates webhook events accordingly. Nohooks utilizes Convoy for efficient webhook delivery and offers a debugging dashboard. It supports multiple accounts and destination endpoints, enabling integration with various services like Airtable, Mailchimp, and Intercom. The tool facilitates automation by triggering actions in response to events, such as service deployments and database updates. Future updates are planned to expand support for additional resources and applications.

On Day 2 of Convoy's Launch Week, the focus is on enhancing the deployment process with updated Helm charts for Kubernetes and integrating forward proxies for added security. The article details configuring Stripe's SmokeScreen and Nginx as forward proxies, discussing the benefits of IP masking and anonymity for webhooks traffic. The new Helm chart version, available on Artifact Hub, simplifies installation and configuration, addressing previous issues like exposed secrets and database management by utilizing Kubernetes secrets and supporting external databases. It also introduces initContainers to handle database migrations efficiently and Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) to automatically scale components based on CPU and memory utilization. Future plans include expanding support for additional forward proxy platforms like Envoy and OpenResty.

Convoy Launch Week has introduced Convoy Playground, a tool designed to simplify the process of integrating and sending webhook events for engineers and engineering teams. Convoy Playground provides resources to test webhook integrations end-to-end, allowing users to receive events from any source by generating a source URL and to send events by adding a destination endpoint. It also includes debugging capabilities, enabling users to view request and response data for troubleshooting. Convoy Playground aims to make webhook event testing and debugging more accessible and encourages user feedback through their community Slack channel.

Convoy has introduced a new feature enhancing webhook idempotency, allowing users to manage idempotent requests from webhook providers and send idempotent webhooks to API consumers. Idempotent HTTP methods like GET, HEAD, PUT, and DELETE enable safe repeat requests without altering server states, while POST can achieve idempotency using an Idempotency key in the request header. Convoy allows users to configure these keys for incoming and outgoing projects, using a SHA256 checksum to de-duplicate events. Incoming projects can extract idempotency keys from various request parts, while outgoing projects require a unique idempotency key to prevent duplicate event delivery. This feature aims to streamline webhook integration, reduce developer workload, and foster collaboration, with ongoing updates throughout Convoy Launch week.

Payourse, a web3 company supported by Celo and Y Combinator, aims to simplify access to cryptocurrency by developing tools and infrastructure for user-friendly crypto products. Hakeem Orewole, Payourse’s CTO, highlighted the challenges in managing notification issues across multiple clients, particularly in determining accountability for service level agreements. The introduction of Convoy, a webhook notification manager, has streamlined this process by allowing Payourse to visualize and debug webhook-related issues from a single dashboard, thereby enhancing error detection and client support. Convoy's Portal Links further facilitate the creation of customer-facing dashboards for event delivery review, which Hakeem appreciates for their straightforward integration and functionality. He actively recommends Convoy to other engineers, underscoring its effectiveness in managing webhook notifications.

Convoy is introducing its first Launch Week from June 26th to June 30th, 2023, marking a shift in their approach to product releases by launching new features or products daily throughout the week. This initiative stems from a successful experimental launch earlier in the year, and aims to enhance product release intentionality, build community engagement, and foster accountability through a public product roadmap. By adopting the Sentry-style release strategy, Convoy plans to improve the release process, while involving the community through Q&A sessions and discussions, and dedicating time for content creation to better support their products. The week will feature multiple announcements, product demos, and customer spotlights, culminating in a community call on the final day to further engage with their audience.

Piggyvest, a prominent Wealthtech company in Sub-Saharan Africa with over 4 million customers, has paid out more than $1 billion to users and is committed to helping Africans achieve financial goals through various products like Pocket and Patronize. The engineering team faced significant challenges in managing millions of events daily using Google Pubsub and Cloud Tasks, particularly with debugging and auditing webhook events, which led to inefficiencies and frequent issues with critical financial transactions. The introduction of Convoy to manage their event infrastructure significantly improved their debugging process, providing detailed event visibility and reducing bug resolution time by 80%, as engineers can now quickly locate and investigate issues using Convoy’s Payload Search with Typesense and other features. This transition has allowed the engineering team to focus more on product development, with the ease of setup and integration, detailed event search capabilities, and responsive technical support being highly appreciated.

Deploying a Convoy instance on Fly.io involves several steps, starting with setting up necessary dependencies like Postgres, Redis, and Typesense to enhance functionality and connectivity. Fly.io offers a platform ideal for deploying distributed applications due to its proximity to users and ease of use, making it suitable for hosting Convoy. The process involves using Fly's command-line tool, flyctl, to create and configure databases and services, followed by deploying the Convoy application itself. The deployment process includes customizing configuration files such as fly.toml to meet specific needs, including setting up internal networking, specifying environment variables, and defining service processes. Once deployed, the application can be accessed through a provided URL, and the setup allows for further scaling or regional deployment adjustments. Users are encouraged to explore additional deployment options, such as using Helm charts or opting for Convoy Cloud, where infrastructure management is handled by Convoy itself.