Show HN: Outpost – OSS infra for outbound webhooks and event destinations

Show HN: Outpost – OSS infra for outbound webhooks and event destinations(github.com)

67 points by alexbouchard 1 year ago | 8 comments

Hey HN, we're launching Outpost, an open-source, self-hostable component designed to handle outbound event delivery for SaaS/API platforms.

If you're building a platform, you eventually need to send events to your users (think payment success, resource updates, workflow changes). Implementing this reliably—handling retries, monitoring, scaling, providing a decent dev experience for consumers, and managing tenants—becomes a significant, recurring engineering task that distracts from core product development. We built Outpost to offload that complexity.

Outpost delivers events via traditional webhooks and also directly to event destinations like message queues and buses. While webhooks are ubiquitous, they have limitations at scale regarding cost, reliability patterns, and security posture. We observed platforms like Stripe, Shopify, and Twilio offering direct bus/queue integrations for these reasons—it's often cheaper and more resilient. It offers a better DX for consumers who prefer programmatic consumption. Outpost provides this flexibility out of the box as a core feature.

Key features:

- Multiple Delivery Methods: Webhooks + native Event Destinations (SQS, Kinesis, GCP Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, Hookdeck, etc.).

- Guaranteed Delivery: At-least-once guarantee with configurable automatic retries.

- Observability: Built-in event log & OpenTelemetry support.

- Management: API for destination (endpoint) management; optional User Portal for end-user self-service (debugging, destination management).

- Multi-tenancy, topics, webhook security best practices (signatures, timestamps), etc.

Given you most likely already have a system in place, Outpost is backward compatible with your existing payload format, HTTP headers, and signatures.

It's written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It's still early days, and we'd love your feedback – especially on the architecture, desired event destinations, or any rough edges you find.

GitHub: https://github.com/hookdeck/outpost Docs: https://outpost.hookdeck.com/docs

Thanks for checking it out!

ksajadi 1 year ago |

Looks great! how is this different from your commercial offering (Hookdeck)?

alexbouchard 1 year ago | |

I expect to have to answer that question a lot! Hookdeck is an event gateway, an unopinionated event log/message bus that operates over HTTP. It can be used to send webhooks, but 80%+ of use cases are for inbound webhooks (consumer side).

We think outbound is best served with an opinionated, purpose-built product, as the use case is very specific. The common feedback we got from event producers is that they are all annoyed by the complexity and costs of their current solution for sending webhooks. We think OSS / self-hosted is the solution to that. We drew from our experience handling 100 billion events, but also kept the scope to the table stakes to be highly efficient and simple to operate.

Event destinations' support is also crucial here because it means more efficient delivery with fewer errors, which can drastically reduce the overhead of event delivery.

lylejantzi3rd 1 year ago | | |

Good answer.

simplesagar 1 year ago |

Congrats on the launch! This is really exciting and seems like an obvious progression on how companies can expose their event streams. Interfaces like kafka are so ubiquitous compared to webhooks. This seems to build on that with infrastructure to take care of all the failure points and tough devex. Anyone who's worked with webhooks knows how common failures are!

leggetter 1 year ago | |

A big +1 on the Kafka destination type being a priority. Thanks!

jonbo372 1 year ago |

Really excited to try Outpost — especially appreciate that it’s open source. Looking forward to testing it in a real-world setup and sharing feedback!

leggetter 1 year ago | |

Looking forward to getting your feedback. We feel we've got a good baseline of features with a few key ones planned (Amazon EventBridge, GCP Pub/Sub, and Kafka destinations). But we need the additional feedback to drive the roadmap.

farbour 1 year ago |

Well done guys!