If you are building an API that integrates with third-party vendors, you will eventually face the webhook flood.
When an external service sends a massive spike of webhook events, the standard approach of processing the data and inserting it into a database synchronously will block the Node.js event loop. Your API will time out, the vendor will assume the delivery failed, and you will drop critical data.
To survive unpredictable traffic spikes, you need to decouple the HTTP response from the data processing. Here is how to implement the "Catch and Release" pattern using Node.js, Express, and BullMQ.
Prerequisites
Node.js and Express installed.
