October 2022 Summaries

As startups like Knock transition to serving enterprise-level customers, they face the challenge of implementing complex features such as single sign-on (SSO), which requires handling multiple identity providers and authentication flows without degrading the user experience. Knock initially considered building SSO in-house but opted for WorkOS, a service providing building blocks for adding enterprise features, due to its ease of implementation, instant support for multiple identity providers, and a user-friendly admin interface. By integrating WorkOS, Knock was able to streamline both the admin and user authentication flows, allowing admins to easily configure SSO and users to authenticate seamlessly using their credentials. This decision not only expedited the SSO integration process but also allowed Knock to focus on its core product while ensuring a reliable and efficient authentication system for its enterprise clients.

Knock, a notifications-as-a-service platform, implemented a new usage-based billing system in partnership with Orb, which they selected after evaluating various alternatives. The billing system consists of three integrated components: Knock's application system, Orb as the usage-based billing provider, and payment processors like Stripe or Bill.com. Knock synchronizes customer and subscription data, while Orb manages subscription details, meters usage, and generates invoices, and payment processors handle payment information. The integration required custom solutions for billing management, such as capturing payment details using Stripe Elements and managing plan upgrades and downgrades. Knock faced challenges like retrying usage reporting, migrating customers to new pricing models, and handling complex Enterprise plan pricing. Despite trade-offs, the decision to use Orb allowed Knock to focus on core business functions, leveraging Orb's flexible pricing models and robust billing infrastructure, which helped streamline their billing system without getting entangled in complex billing details.

Knock Sources is a new feature that allows integration of customer data platforms (CDPs) like Segment and reverse ETL platforms like Hightouch with Knock, enabling seamless notification workflows without the need for direct API calls. This innovation caters to engineers, product managers, and marketers by simplifying the creation and management of notification workflows, using existing data flowing through event instrumentation tools. Knock Sources is designed to be flexible, allowing users to map event properties to Knock workflow parameters, thereby maintaining the integrity of existing data models and avoiding the need for new event configurations. It supports multiple actions for a single event, providing better visibility and debugging capabilities within the notification system. This development is part of Knock's mission to equip teams with tools for creating delightful notification experiences, and future updates will include additional source integrations and non-real-time notification capabilities.

Knock has announced its certification for GDPR compliance, which is a data protection regulation enacted by the European Union in 2018, ensuring users have control over the collection of their information. This certification allows Knock's EU and UK customers to exercise their right to be forgotten, reflecting the company's commitment to data security and privacy. Knock is also SOC 2 Type II certified, and the company emphasizes its continuous efforts to enhance the security of its services. Interested parties can find more detailed information on Knock's security practices on their security page.

Knock, a company providing flexible notifications infrastructure, leverages PostgreSQL as its primary datastore to handle workflow configurations and notification records, leading to experiences in optimizing indexing strategies for database tables. The text outlines several key lessons in indexing, emphasizing the balance between storage and write costs associated with adding indexes, as well as the various methods PostgreSQL employs to read indexed data, such as sequential, index-only, index, and bitmap index scans. It highlights the importance of understanding when to use combined versus multicolumn indexes, noting that the latter can be more efficient if queries align with the order of columns. Additionally, the guide discusses using sorted indexes to enhance performance for ordered queries with limits and stresses the need to trust and work in harmony with PostgreSQL's query planner. By focusing on strategies that maximize query efficiency, Knock aims to optimize database performance, acknowledging that it's impossible to cater to every query pattern but striving for the most effective indexing within their unique use case.