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!

user:	jonbo372
created:	April 2, 2024
karma:	1
about:	Senior Principal Engineer at Courier. Previously spent 11 years at Twilio, most recently as Senior Software Architect. Passionate about building globally scalable systems that can handle anything you throw at them.