Beyond Webhooks: Integrating Kafka and Pub/Sub Systems with Triggers.do

In the world of workflow automation, webhooks are king. They are the simple, HTTP-based glue that connects thousands of SaaS applications, firing off workflows for everything from new sales leads to completed payments. But as your business scales and your architecture matures, you may start to bump up against the inherent limitations of a webhook-only approach. What happens when you need to process thousands of events per second? What if your endpoint is temporarily down?

For mission-critical, high-throughput systems, modern engineering teams rely on the power of event-driven architecture, using message brokers like Kafka, RabbitMQ, and cloud-native services like Google Pub/Sub. These systems offer a level of scalability, reliability, and decoupling that webhooks can't match.

The challenge, however, has been connecting this powerful backend infrastructure to your business logic in an easy, accessible way. That's where Triggers.do comes in. We bridge the gap, allowing you to move beyond simple webhooks and activate your workflows directly from enterprise-grade event streams.

The Limits of a Webhook-Only World

Webhooks are fantastic for getting started, but they are fundamentally a point-to-point communication method. This simple design can lead to several challenges at scale:

Reliability: If your workflow's endpoint is down for maintenance or experiencing an outage, an incoming webhook from a service like Stripe or Shopify might be lost forever. While some services have retry mechanisms, they aren't guaranteed.
Scalability: A single webhook endpoint can become a bottleneck during traffic spikes, like a Black Friday sale. Your system has to be prepared to handle the full firehose of events, or risk dropping data and failing to initiate critical processes.
Tight Coupling: The event producer (the app sending the webhook) is tightly coupled to the consumer (your workflow URL). If your endpoint URL changes, you have to update it in every single service that sends you webhooks.
Limited Fan-Out: What if one event, like a new user signing up, needs to trigger three different workflows (e.g., "Onboarding Email," "Add to CRM," and "Notify Sales")? A simple webhook can't easily "fan out" to multiple destinations.

Enter the Pub/Sub Paradigm: Kafka, RabbitMQ, and Real-Time Events

Event-driven systems solve these problems using a publish-subscribe (or "pub/sub") model.

Producers (your applications or services) publish messages (events) to a central "topic" or "exchange" (e.g., a Kafka topic named platform.order.created).
Consumers (your workflows or other services) "subscribe" to that topic to receive the messages.

The producer doesn't know or care who is listening. It just broadcasts its event. This elegant decoupling, managed by a message broker, provides immense benefits:

Extreme Scalability: Systems like Kafka are designed to handle millions of messages per second.
Durability: Events are persisted in a log. If a consumer is offline, it can reconnect and process the events it missed. No data is lost.
Flexibility: Any number of consumers can subscribe to the same topic. This makes "fan-out" scenarios trivial, allowing a single event to kick off dozens of independent business processes.

Triggers.do: Your Universal Event-Driven Automation Hub

So, you have a high-performance Kafka topic streaming all your business events. How do you translate those raw data streams into actionable logic without writing a mountain of boilerplate code?

Triggers.do acts as the intelligent, filtering consumer for your pub/sub systems.

Instead of just receiving an event, Triggers.do allows you to inspect, filter, and route it to the precise workflow you need—all with a simple, declarative definition.

Let's look at a practical example based on our code:

import { Trigger } from 'triggers.do';

// A trigger that starts the 'HighValueOrderFulfillment' workflow
// whenever a new order over $500 is placed.
const highValueOrderTrigger = new Trigger({
  event: 'platform.order.created',
  filter: 'data.totalAmount > 500',
  action: {
    workflow: 'HighValueOrderFulfillment',
    inputs: {
      orderId: '{{data.id}}',
      customerEmail: '{{data.customer.email}}'
    }
  }
});

await highValueOrderTrigger.activate();

Here's how Triggers.do makes this powerful integration simple:

Connect Your Source: First, you connect Triggers.do to your event source. Whether it's a Kafka cluster, a RabbitMQ exchange, or a Google Pub/Sub topic, you configure it as an event source.
Listen for Events: The event: 'platform.order.created' line tells the trigger to listen to events with this specific name, which could correspond to a Kafka topic or a specific event type within a stream.
Apply Powerful Filters: This is the magic. The filter: 'data.totalAmount > 500' line ensures that this trigger only fires for high-value orders. You could have another trigger with a filter for data.totalAmount <= 500 that initiates a standard fulfillment workflow. This allows you to create sophisticated, branching logic right at the point of ingestion, preventing unnecessary workflow runs.
Activate Workflows: Once an event meets the filter criteria, the action block is executed. Triggers.do initiates the HighValueOrderFulfillment workflow and uses simple templating {{data.id}} to pass the relevant event payload data directly as inputs.

With this model, you can have a single order.created event from your message queue trigger multiple, distinct workflows based on its payload:

Event: Order for $1,200. Action: Fires HighValueOrderFulfillment and NotifyVIPManager workflows.
Event: Order for $35. Action: Fires StandardOrderFulfillment workflow.
Event: Order for $250 from a new customer. Action: Fires StandardOrderFulfillment and WelcomeSequence workflows.

Automate at the True Speed of Your Business

Webhooks are a great starting point for business process automation, but true scalability and reliability are born from event-driven architecture. Triggers.do is built to embrace this modern paradigm, providing the essential bridge between your core event streams and your actionable business logic.