What is Convoy?

Convoy is an open-source webhooks gateway. It is the fastest way developers send and receives millions of webhook events with rich features like retries, rate limiting, static ips, endpoint authentication, circuit breaking, rolling endpoint secrets, fine-grained event routing, customer-facing webhooks dashboard etc. Convoy is also available as a Cloud Platform for teams that want to use software off the shelf rather than deploy an instance.

Profile

Convoy is an open-source webhooks gateway designed for growing organisations to abstract all webhooks implementation (for both sending and receiving webhook events). It lives at the edge of your network, multiplexing and demultiplexing webhook events from backend services to client endpoints and vice-versa.

It provides the tools for platform engineers to provide a consistent development environment for product-focused teams to ship webhook to their customers.

Focus

Today, in growing organizations, delivering new functionality usually means spinning up a new microservice and releasing new APIs behind an API Gateway to the end user. It effectively has become a plug-and-play experience; developers can quickly build new APIs and allow the gateway to take care of authentication, rate limiting, circuit breaking etc., thereby not duplicating effort across multiple microservices.

Convoy’s focus as a webhooks gateway is to deliver a similar experience to development teams as they decide to add webhooks to their backend services. It becomes a plug-and-play experience where the webhooks gateway takes care of the endpoint authentication, retries, rate limiting, circuit breaking etc. The aim is to be an end-to-end webhooks management platform for development teams.

Background

Convoy is a YCombinator-backed startup with a team of senior engineers who understand the pain of building and managing a webhooks infrastructure at scale. From its inception, Convoy has always been open source, with a public roadmap and plans to remain open. It’s built in Golang, the same language used to build tools like Kubernetes and Prometheus.

Convoy main features

Consistent Webhooks Management

Similar to API Gateways for end-to-end API Management. Convoy provides an end-to-end platform for webhooks management. It receives webhook events from third-party providers like Stripe & Shopify and routes the events to one or more backend services that need them, as well as receives events from multiple backend services and sends them to client endpoints. This ensures webhooks implementation is consistent across microservices and teams. It reduces the learning curve for product teams to adopt and ship faster.

Fine-grained Event Routing

Either you’re receiving webhooks from third parties or sending them to client endpoints. Convoy provides the tools to perform fine-grained event routing based on the event type or payload structure. It relies on a subset of MongoDB's Extended JSON v2 to match event payload structure and route events to their respective destination(s).

Customer-Facing Webhook Dashboards

Convoy allows you to quickly spin up a customer-facing webhooks dashboard to give users the ability to debug their endpoints end-to-end without any human interaction. To do this, Convoy ships with a prebuilt dashboard you can embed into your application using an iframe, or you build a white-labelled dashboard over Convoy’s APIs. Users can debug webhooks, retry events, add endpoints, and subscribe to several webhook event types on this dashboard.