How Guesty Eliminated Webhook Complexity and Freed up Their Best Engineers · Svix

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Svix is used by a variety of industries for different use cases.
Guesty is the world's leading holiday property management platform.
Guesty operates in over 80 countries, and has over 800 employees worldwide spread across 15 offices. Guesty's extensive product suite helps their customers manage booking, listings, invoicing, communication, and more; for customers managing anywhere from a single listing to thousands of listings.
We sat down with Aram Ben Shushan Ehrlich, an Engineering Group Manager responsible for Guesty's critical webhooks infrastructure, to talk about their challenges with their previous homegrown system and their experience migrating to Svix.
Guesty is sending tens of millions of webhooks a month with Svix, and having robust webhooks has enabled their customers building powerful systems on top of their product, increased customer satisfaction, reduced support burden, and saved their best engineers a lot of time that they can now focus on the business instead.
Guesty uses webhooks to programmatically notify their customers about every change that happens on the system. They send an event when a property is booked, a message is sent, invoice is paid, and hundreds of other types of events.
These events are then used by their customers to build automations or integrate with internal systems. While every segment of their customer base benefits from the webhooks, they are most critical to the larger enterprise customers who rely on and require having them..
Our customers who use webhooks are often our largest customers. This means that having great webhooks is especially important, and any friction in the onboarding or issues in production can have significant adverse impact on the business.
Guesty's webhooks are also used by all of their ecosystem partners to build on top of the Guesty platform. Webhooks are how these integrations work, making the Guesty platform more extensible and powerful for their customers, and enabling more business to build on top of Guesty.
Our large enterprise customers use our webhooks to ensure that both they and their system stay up to date about the status of their properties.
Guesty understood the importance of webhooks from early on and have been offering webhooks to their customers since the beginning. They have invested significant time and resources maintaining their webhook system over the years, with some of the company's best engineers working on it.
We wasted a lot of the time and much more than originally expected from our best engineers, tech leads, and managers; thinking about, improving, and solving issues and challenges with our webhooks system.
Though even with all of the time and effort invested in their homegrown webhook system they still had a variety of gaps, requests, and fires that continuously took more engineering time away from the core product.
The problem was that you'd have random alerts and issues coming from your webhook system that would distract our best engineers and waste a lot of their valuable time. It didn't happen every week, but when it did happen it was very painful.
Ever since we added Svix we are all at ease. No more retries, no more endpoint failures, no random webhook errors. We had our best engineers working on it, and they are now free to focus on innovating on our product.
Svix enabled Guesty to stop worrying about webhooks altogether by turning webhook delivery to a simple API and shifting the complexity to Svix.
Managing our own webhook system was a nightmare I'm glad to have left behind. As the manager of the team responsible for webhooks, this has been my personal source of pain and suffering.
Guesty also experienced first-hand the same realization we hear from many of our customers: webhooks are harder than they seem.
Part of the challenge with webhooks is that you start small with something that looks achievable and you have a good understanding of. For example, you may think you can just setup a queue and start sending. This works well at first, but the problems appear very quickly as soon as customers start adopting it.
All of a sudden you'll start getting traffic spikes which can lead to the system getting backed up, then you'll start experiencing noisy neighbor issues where one noisy customer is affecting the delivery of another. You'll also want to add retries at some point, but you'll sooner or later face a thundering herd problem, random HTTP issues, very slow servers that are blocking your workers and much more.
At Svix, we hear the same story time and time again. A customer builds a simple system initially, whether it's due to deadlines, lack of time to invest in the webhooks, or unfamiliarity with the long list of challenges; and then they discover all the hard lessons in production which turns into a forever project and an endless cycle of issues with the webhooks system and constantly patching it.
This means you constantly have to add new monitoring, new mechanisms, and new solutions for problems. This is especially true as you grow your traffic, there are just a lot of challenges that will catch you by surprise that you may not be aware of ahead of time.
It's just annoying and exhausting to see yet another random webhook lag, error, or support ticket pop up.
Additionally, these challenges are made much worse because most companies don't have a dedicated webhooks team that just works on the webhooks system 24/7. This means that the team suffers from constant whiplash getting reintroduced to the webhooks code and challenges every time a new issue or customer request arises.
This is something Aram and his team also noticed with their homegrown solution:
What is especially annoying about webhooks is that you sometimes get weird issues. For example, "Why is my queue 15x larger or slower all of a sudden?"