[stephenr]

> I'd prefer at-most-once delivery via something that establishes a reusable connection (grpc or even websockets?) and backed by an events endpoint like Stripe's where the client can read everything that would have been sent. That way the client can replay all the events at leisure and retries aren't the server's responsibility.

Isn't that basically a description of SSE (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server-sent_events)?

[strken]

You could use SSE, long polling, or even a webhook. With the latter two you'd miss out on some of the performance gains of not needing to re-establish a connection unless the producer does http streaming, but the main stability points are not using webhooks as the sole means of delivery and not flushing events after they're delivered. So many webhook implementations don't go far enough and just fling events at the consumer with a short-term retry policy, or none at all, and then don't provide a way to see what events got missed.

[stephenr]

I mean, you can use anything if you just want a dumb pipe to put an ad-hoc data stream over.

My point is that SSE is already a standard to do exactly the thing you're asking for: publish a one-way event stream, with a built-in mechanism for reconnecting and telling the remote end the last event you received (so you can catch up on anything missed during the disconnected period).

[strken]

Right, sure, I've never used it outside a browser but I guess it would work fine. My point is that A) no matter which standard you use for sending a stream of events it's probably better than a webhook, and B) it's still important to provide both a long retention window and good tools to query events for debugging no matter what you use.