Edgility is a leader when it comes to SMS services in Australia. The company goal is to help businesses integrate SMS into their workflow, whether that be contacting customers via SMS, communicating with staff, bulk marketing, or integrating SMS into apps.
With 25 years experience, Edgility's enterprise and consumer product has been perfectly tailored to their customers. When it comes to new features that involve webhooks, reliability and speed are a must.
Evan is the Lead Developer at Edgility. He and his team are responsible for the overall product. This includes marketing SMS, transactional SMS, confirmation SMS for developers, and 2FA.
Evan and his team receive webhooks from multiple telecommunication carriers. Their problem occurred whenever they needed to change a webhook URL, as the telecommunicator would take 1 to 2 weeks to input the changes in their system.
Unfortunately for Evan, telecommunication companies don't have a control panel to switch URLs, like many API companies do. Instead, Evan has to open a ticket with customer service, which is a long and arduous task. It's a time intensive activity for the carrier, and has a big impact on the developer team's ability to work on new features.
A while ago, Evan found Hookdeck while browsing Hacker News. He signed up using his personal email, thinking it was a cool service but not relevant to him at the time. When he was dealing with webhook related issues, he remembered Hookdeck and quickly went back to find the thread on HN using the Algolia search.
First, Evan was trying to solve how Hookdeck could help him avoid dealing with the long wait times associated with tele carriers updating his webhook URLs. He was looking for a solution that would allow him to provide permanent webhook URLs and make all the routing changes within the same product.
With Hookdeck, Evan was able to give each of his carriers a permanent webhook URL and work the routing rules within Hookdeck.
The process looks like this:
Voila! Webhook routing without interacting with the telecommunication carriers!
Essentially, Hookdeck is acting as a message queue when it comes to routing webhooks from the producers (telecommunication carriers) to the right consumer (Evan's endpoints).
Webhooks fail silently. It's not as obvious as a customer saying they didn't receive "X," it becomes harder to identify and to fix.
A lot of webhook providers won't actually send you an alert when a webhook fails. Some webhook failures are harder to keep track of, for example a validation error. Unlike 500 errors, where you are likely to have systems that are already monitoring them in place, an authentication error is more likely to fail silently.
By putting his integrations on Hookdeck, Evan benefited from Hookdeck's constant monitoring of webhooks. He soon realized that receiving alerts each time a webhook fails and having access to manual retries were key features that helped his team recover from issues before their customers noticed anything.
Evan and his team were able to recognize that a bug was introduced that would impact the webhooks routing for 3 customers. Evan received alerts, and then went into Hookdeck where he could easily search for and identify the failed webhooks. He quickly started to troubleshoot the issue and deployed a fix in record time. Then, he manually replayed the failed webhooks.
All of this before the customers even had the chance to see any of the bug's impact!
Before Hookdeck, the same scenario would have looked like this:
Evan considers Hookdeck a crucial part of his stack.
Hookdeck was able to solve his biggest pain by removing his back and forth with the carrier. The Edgility developers now control everything related to their webhook routing, which saves them many hours of precious development time.
After transitioning all their webhook integrations onto Hookdeck, they have a lot of confidence in their ability to quickly respond to and fix any errors that might occur. In other words, Evan and his team can now deliver the delightful experience that Edgility’s customers expect.
I've been recommending Hookdeck to tons of devs. The product is so useful and their team is extremely responsive. The experience has been great.