Dropbox launched support for webhooks. This is a great move.
Amazon S3 does have something similar. You can enable notifications via their Simple Notification Service ( SNS ), but then you are charged for the SNS usage. For many people that will make it less appealing than traditional direct webhooks.
Dropbox continues to use a mix of Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) and separate dedicated hardware to manage user file. I wonder if they are using any AWS services to process what are likely millions of HTTP requests for webhooks.
2 replies on “Dropbox Webhooks”
We (superfeedr) have been waiting for a long time to start seeing more technical articles on how to write scalable webhook infrastructures. This is usually very different from what web systems are built where the bottleneck is *incoming* data, and not so much *outgoing* requests.
It definitely presents a specific category of issues. You’ve got things like retry tracking and back off, and the always painful timeout issues.
While probably not at the same scale, another service that would be interesting in that area is Stripe.com. I’m sure they’ve had to build up a specific set of infrastructure items to deal with their webhook notifications.