Phil Leggetter
Hookdeck Review 2024
For us at Hookdeck, 2024 was a year of rediscovery and repositioning, shipping new features, improving developer experience, and demonstrating the art of the possible through examples and tutorials.
Hookdeck: An Event Gateway
We began 2024 with Hookdeck clearly defined as an event gateway, enables the following use cases:
- Webhook Gateway (Inbound webhook infrastructure): Reliably ingest events from services such as Stripe, Shopify, Twilio, etc. and deliver to your applications with fault tolerance.
- Outbound webhook infrastructure: Enabling developer platforms to offer outbound webhook capabilities, exposing events from your platforms to developers.
- Connecting third-party services: Defining workflows from ingesting events through to calling API to support event-driven workflows.
- Asynchronous API Gateway: Quickly and reliably ingest events for processing in scenarios such as IoT and analytics.
- Event Broker: Support decoupled communications between various services - both internal and external - within an event-driven architecture.
Read the event gateway announcment post and watch the Hookdeck founders discuss the event gateway.
New Platform Features
Hookdeck Organizations and Projects
We introduced organizations and projects to help logically structure your Hookdeck projects by environment and improve configuration, billing, and access control. Project throughput control also introduced the ability to manage event throughput on a per-project basis to better manage and monitor webhook traffic.
Learn more about Hookdeck Organizations and Projects →
Enhanced Retry Configuration
Status-based rules, and Retry-After HTTP header support enable more granular and programmatic control over webhook delivery attempt retries.
Read more about Enhanced Retry Configuration →
Concurrent Delivery Configuration
We've added support for setting the delivery rate to Destinations to specifying how many events can be delivered concurrently.
For example, if you only want to receive one event at a time, you can set the concurrency to 1.
Read more about Destination delivery rates.
Increased Source Verification Support
We added Hookdeck Source verification support for over 20 providers including Zendesk, TikTok, Airwallex, Replicate, Customer.io, Praxis, Treezor, Bridge, PayPal, Paddle, Discord Interactions, Slack, Tebex, Fiserv, Bondsmith, Telnyx, TokenIO, Front, Orb, Enode, Ebay, Shopline, Linear, and Sanity.
See a full list of directly supported Source providers. However, many other providers are supported through generic webhook verification such as HMAC, API Key, and Basic Auth.
Developer Experience Improvements
Hookdeck TypeScript SDK
The Hookdeck TypeScript SDK provides a type-safe integrations for developers to programmatically control all the resources within a Hookdeck project: sources, destinations, connections, transformations, filters, and more.
Hookdeck Vercel Middleware
The Hookdeck Vercel Middleware turns any configured Vercel endpoint into an asynchronous API with thoughput control, authentication, and a number of other features. It simplifies and improves observability and reliablity when webhook handling in Vercel applications. The middleware automatically configures Hookdeck connections using an IaC (infrastructure as code) approach.
Learn more about the Hookdeck Vercel Middleware.
AI Docs Enhancements
We updated our documentation search to be AI-enabled. We know this can be overhyped, but we genuinely think this is very powerful. For example, you can use the Ask AI feature to provide customized guides.
Try out the Ask AI feature on the Hookdeck documentation.
Hookdeck CLI Improvements
The Hookdeck CLI now supports listening to multiple sources from a single CLI instance. Check out the CLI docs.
Hookdeck EventCatalog Generator
Visualize your Hookdeck Connections, Events and Event Schema with the Hookdeck EventCatalog generator.
Tutorials
Throughout 2024, we worked with a number of technology partners to demonstrate what can be achieved when combining our technologies. Here's a selection of tutorials we published:
Scalable Generative AI with Replicate and MongoDB
An asynchronous AI use case demonstrating how to use Hookdeck to queue API requests to ensure you can avoid API rate limits and queuing the asynchronous responses for both generative AI and embedding generation. The tutorial covers using Replicate and MongoDB, but the principles apply to any services.
Verify and Transform Twilio SMS Webhooks
This tutorial walks through building an SMS voting application using Twilio, Hookdeck, and Supabase. It covers queuing and verifying Twilio webhooks, and transforming the webhook payload as part of the vote format validation process.
Omnichannel Conversations with Vonage and Postmark
How to build an "OmniText" solution that enables a conversation to cross communication mediums, specifically SMS using the Vonage Messages API and email using the Postmark email API. It walks through the step-by-step process of configuring and building the solution using Hookdeck to receive webhooks and integrate the Vonage and Postmark APIs.
Per-user Database Architecture with Xata, Clerk, and Next.js
Per-user database architecture provides benefits, such as data isolation and improved performance but you may assume is difficult to achieve. This tutorial explains how to build a per-user database architecture using Xata, Clerk webhooks, Hookdeck, and Next.js.
Examples
- SupaVlog: A starter kit for creating vlogs using Supabase, Stream, Hookdeck, and Next.js.
- SupaPoll: An open-source SMS voting application built with Twilio, Supabase, and Hookdeck.
- SupaHooks: A template for implementing outbound webhooks with Next.js and Supabase.
Podcasts and Videos
- Building an Event Gateway on Software Engineering Daily with Hookdeck CEO, Alex Bouchard.
- From Webhook Infrastructure to Event Gateway on Scaling DevTools: Alex Bouchard, co-founder of Hookdeck, explains that rather than pivoting Hookdeck, we refined our messaging to better align with how developers were already utilizing Hookdeck.
- Webhook Authentication: Alex (CEO), Maurice (CTO), and Phil (Head of DevRel) discuss webhook authentication and security.
Customer Stories
- Churnkey: How Hookdeck unlocked 100x event scale at Churnkey.
- Weekend Health: How Weekend Health Supercharged its Webhook Infrastructure with Hookdeck.
- Wineshipping: 90% fewer API calls, 3,000% better CX: How Hookdeck took Wineshipping from polling to an event-driven architecture.
That's it for 2024. Bring on 2025!
Don't forget to get in touch if you'd like to share your story of using Hookdeck or if you have any questions.