A webhook is (ok, squint really hard) a bit like one direction of a TCP connection: state at the sender tracking what the receiver has seen, state at the receiv

A webhook is (ok, squint really hard) a bit like one direction of a TCP connection: state at the sender tracking what the receiver has seen, state at the receiver for rejecting duplicates, logic for retrying and acknowledging receipt. The state management kind of sucks though, and it isn't sufficiently abstracted over, hence the original article. So why can't we use actual TCP connections for long-lived relationships? Because kernels make TCP more fragile than it has to be. There's no particular reason TCP connections couldn't outlive process instances, machine reboots, etc., except for the way TCP is implemented in the kernel.