Tom Hacohen, Founder and CEO of Svix, dives into the world of webhooks, unraveling their complexities and importance for businesses. He discusses how Svix tackles reliability and security in webhook management, sharing insights on the evolution of their service driven by user feedback. Tom contrasts Rust and Python for startups, emphasizing Rust's reliability and maintenance benefits. He also touches on the challenges of transitioning applications from Python to Rust, memory management intricacies, and the significance of stability in systems during periods of rapid growth.
Svix builds a reliable and scalable webhook service in Rust, addressing complex issues like security and observability for users.
The transition to Rust enhances Svix's performance and reliability, despite a steeper learning curve and initial development challenges.
Tom Hacohen emphasizes the importance of maintaining practical goals to avoid technical debt while meeting diverse customer needs effectively.
Deep dives
Introduction to Svix and Webhook Solutions
Svix, founded by Tom Hackoen, provides a webhook sending service that helps companies manage webhook communication through simple APIs and SDKs. The solution enables users to send and receive webhooks efficiently, ensuring a seamless integration experience while mitigating common issues associated with traditional approaches to webhooks. Unlike standard API calls, webhooks can be complex, as they involve relaying information to a third-party server controlled by the customer. This complexity underscores the importance of having a reliable system, as security, scalability, and system management become significant concerns as customer demand grows.
Challenges of Webhook Management
Webhook management involves several technical challenges that go beyond simple HTTP requests, including scalability, customer isolation, and security vulnerabilities. Without proper oversight, issues experienced by one customer can negatively affect others, leading to what is known as a 'noisy neighbor' problem. Moreover, webhooks lack built-in error visibility, meaning failures often go unnoticed by the receiving end, making observability and logging paramount. By providing enhancements such as automatic retries and an embedded UI for clients to monitor their webhooks, Svix aims to eliminate these concerns, offering a high-quality user experience.
The Evolution of Svix's Development
Tom Hackoen recounts the journey of Svix’s development, beginning with initial requests for webhook solutions at his previous company. This interest prompted him to explore building a webhook service that ultimately revealed significant underlying complexities, leading to reluctance in moving forward initially. Persistent demand from users pushed the decision to develop Svix further, culminating in a product that addresses the challenges previously encountered. Tom's realization that many users prefer a hassle-free solution led to the successful launch of Svix, which has since evolved to cater to various use cases across both small startups and large enterprises.
Choosing Rust for Reliability and Performance
The transition to Rust for Svix's infrastructure was made to achieve better reliability, performance, and safety compared to their initial Python prototype. While Rust does introduce a steeper learning curve and can hinder rapid initial development, it significantly reduces error likelihoods in production. The detailed type system of Rust helps to catch potential issues early, thereby reducing the number of bugs and production errors. Moreover, the transition has resulted in substantial improvements in memory usage, efficiency, and latency, leading to an overall better-performing system while easing the burden of scalability.
Maintaining Stability and Avoiding Technical Debt
Maintaining stability and avoiding unnecessary technical debt is crucial for Svix's operations, especially concerning naming conventions and system complexity. Tom emphasizes the need to be practical and avoid aiming for unattainable goals, such as 100% uptime, which can paradoxically make the system less stable. By focusing on maintaining a pragmatic approach to development, the team can mitigate complexity while addressing customer needs effectively. Notably, defining clear API contracts and utilizing type safety greatly helps in managing potential breaking changes, ensuring a smooth development workflow and high-quality output.
We don't usually think much about Webhooks -- at least I don't. It's just web requests after all, right? In reality, there is a lot of complexity behind routing webhook requests through the internet. What if a webhook request gets lost? How do you know it was received in the first place? Can it be a security issue if a webhook gets handled twice? (Spoiler alert: yes)
Today I sit down with Tom from Svix to talk about what it takes to build an enterprise-ready webhook service. Of course it's written in Rust.
About Svix
Svix provides webhooks as a service. They build a secure, reliable, and scalable webhook sending and receiving system using Rust. The company handles billions of webhooks a year, so they know a thing or two about the complexities involved.
About Tom Hacohen
Tom is an entrepreneur and open source maintainer from Tel-Aviv (Israel) and based in the US. He's worked with people from all around the globe (excluding Antarctica). Prior to Svix, he worked as an Engineer at Samsung's Open Source Group on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) that are used by the Samsung backed Tizen mobile operating system.
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