The Event Destinations Initiative
A model for event interoperability between event producers and their consumers to favor better developer experience, robust integration, and infrastructural efficiency.
Manifesto
01
A decade of webhooks: Progress with limits
Over the last 10 years, webhooks have become the go-to mechanism for delivering events from developer platforms to support other platform integrations, custom integrations, and workflows. Webhooks have been transformative and offer wide compatibility but come with well-known issues:
-
Lack of broadly adopted standards
No universal approach to retries, timeouts, security, or payload format.
-
Performance bottlenecks
Suboptimal for high-throughput scenarios; no batching, efficient encoding (e.g., Protobuf), or persistent HTTP connections without consumer-side Keep Alive dependency.
-
Opt-in security
Security through verification is opt-in and often more complex than API authentication, making secure integrations tedious or incorrectly implemented.
-
High operational & infrastructural costs
High failure rates and inconsistent event consumer performance make webhooks expensive to operate and maintain.
Webhooks are the least common denominator. They offer amazing reach but lack capabilities at scale. How can you combine the reach of webhooks with the capabilities of other event paradigms? With Event Destinations.
"At Twilio, we would often see spikes in usage, which would lead to us accidentally DoSing our user's webhook endpoints."
Reimagining event delivery
Best practices today often dictate validating and queuing webhooks via a message bus upon receipt. This raises a fundamental question: Why depend on inefficient public HTTP endpoints? Why not send events directly to secure and efficient event destinations?
The emergence of event destinations
Pioneers in the industry are shifting away from traditional webhooks toward a more versatile model. For example, Stripe's Event Destinations allow developers to select the best destination for their needs - webhooks are just one of the options. This shift brings clear advantages.
For event producers:
-
Efficiency gains
Reduced failure rates and retried deliveries compared to public HTTP endpoints. Unlock improved performance for high-throughput scenarios.
-
Protocol flexibility
Leverage more performant protocols and encodings.
-
Cost & resource efficient
Smart retry logic, improved deliverability and scalable infrastructure minimize resource consumption, reducing operational costs while ensuring seamless event delivery at any scale.
For event consumers:
-
Streamlined infrastructure & operations
Eliminate the need for API gateways, load balancers, HTTP consumers, and other infrastructure components, reducing maintenance overhead.
-
Reduced developer burden
Receive events directly to existing or preferred infrastructure and make use of existing and familiar ecosystem tooling.
-
Predictable behavior
Standardize event expectations—the message bus handles timeouts, retries, and security.
Better developer experience for all
At the core of this shift is a commitment to enhancing the developer experience. Platforms can improve the developer experience by expanding event delivery options and capabilities, moving beyond only offering traditional webhooks by supporting Event Destinations such as AWS SQS, GCP PubSub, Hookdeck, RabbitMQ, and Kafka, to name a few.
This DX evolution helps everyone; developers gain tools that are more powerful and simpler to use and maintain. Developers are more successful and faster at adopting developer platforms.
In particular:
-
Ease of integration
Developers no longer need to set up and manage HTTP endpoints, debug connection issues, or manually handle retries and timeouts. Instead, they can focus on building value-driven features.
-
Reduced cognitive load
Standardization in retries, security, and performance handling allows developers to rely on consistent, predictable event delivery without reinventing the wheel.
-
Built-in scalability
As systems scale, efficient protocols, batching, and proven resilient infrastructure ensure event delivery remains reliable, even under high throughput.
This evolution isn't just about solving pain points—it's about unlocking possibilities new possibilities for developers building event-driven applications. By prioritizing interoperability, security, and efficiency, Event Destinations represent the next step in creating a developer experience that empowers everyone.
The vision
Webhooks have brought us to where we are today and will undoubtedly remain a cornerstone of event interoperability for the foreseeable future. However, as the industry evolves, the path forward lies in progressively adopting interoperable, secure, and efficient Event Destinations.
By enhancing existing webhook capabilities while introducing new destination types, developers can transition at their own pace, maintain backward compatibility and leverage the best of both worlds.
This incremental approach ensures continuity while enabling innovation, simplifying event-driven architectures, and creating better developer experiences for everyone.
Guidelines
02
How to implement Event Destinations
Event Destinations is not a standard. It is a set of guidelines for event producers to follow.
Required:
-
At least two event destination types, including webhooks
-
Automatic delivery retries with exponential backoff
-
APIs to create, update, and delete destinations
-
Alerts for destination failures
Recommended:
-
At-least-once event delivery guarantee
-
Event topics and topics-based subscriptions
-
Auto-disabling of failing destinations after too many failures
-
Developer-facing UX to configure destinations & inspect events
-
Manual retries via UI or API
-
Filtering based on payload content
Implementations
03
Event Destinations in action
A number of companies have inspired the Event Destinations Initiative and have an existing implementation.
Supporters
04
What devtools builders are saying
"In his book Flow Architectures, James Urquhart envisions a future where APIs are inherently asynchronous, with synchronous APIs being reserved only for scenarios where they are truly necessary.
The Event Destinations Initiative represents a significant step toward realizing that vision. Enabling API producers to adopt the most efficient and performant methods for sending and receiving asynchronous, non-blocking data is a development I wholeheartedly support—particularly when it is driven by a collaborative and open effort.
This direction strongly aligns with the vision we champion at AsyncAPI, and the synergy between these efforts is both promising and exciting. I am eager to see the Event Destinations Initiative succeed and contribute to the evolution and blending of API and EDA ecosystems."
"I've been working with (and often against) webhooks for years, both as a consumer and an implementer, always wishing that we as an industry could come up with something better. In my opinion, Event Destinations are exactly that."
"While webhooks solve the problem that the internet wasn't created to be real-time, producing and consuming them at scale is hard. Event Destinations provide a long-awaited set of guidelines that enable seamless connectivity between applications. I'm excited to see the new breed of apps and user experiences that this unleashes."
"Webhooks are a great idea, suffering from a bad implementation. Event Destinations is an incredible project to move the industry forward with a consumer experience that works for developers, rather than against them."
"For years, I've been thinking about the evolution of webhooks. Why create them, verify them, manage and scale them? Why can't companies directly send information into brokers? We can simplify the whole thing, and event destinations may be the next step forward. EDA is becoming more accessible for everyone, so why not make handling real-time events easier, too?"
"Delivering webhooks at scale is hard. Event Destinations represents a required evolution of event delivery, helping event producers scale more efficiently and providing a much improved developer experience for event consumers."
With the support of
-
Vlad Pick
Engineering Manager @ Attentive
-
Alex Plugaru
Co-founder & CTO @ Gorgias
-
Patrick Malatack
Former VP Product @ Twilio
-
Maurice Kherlakian
Co-Founder and CTO @ Hookdeck
Contribute
05
Help shape Event Destinations
Contribute the the Event Destinations Initiative by providing feedback on the guidelines within the specification, submitting other examples of implementations, or sharing your support for the initiative.