Finding and fixing eventual consistency with Stripe events

Sequin, a company that streams data from services like Stripe to databases and messaging systems, encountered challenges with eventual consistency while using Stripe's /events API endpoint for real-time data synchronization. The company initially relied on polling for stronger consistency guarantees over webhooks, but faced difficulties with cursoring through events due to the API's eventual consistency, which can cause missing events when querying rapidly. Stripe's thoughtful change detection features, such as the /events endpoint, allow users to track changes like customer creation or subscription updates. However, the Sequin team discovered that events could be skipped if multiple events were created at the same timestamp, as the API's event IDs are not strictly ordered. To address this, the team implemented a new cursoring strategy that delays updating the cursor if recent events are detected, thus reducing the risk of missing events at the cost of slight latency. This situation highlights the complexities of managing eventual consistency in APIs and the importance of designing predictable and consistent data interfaces for engineering teams.

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