Expanding Our API-First Offering
Building and scaling a geospatial solution remains a complex and technically challenging endeavor. The end-to-end process, which involves searching for the right data sets, estimating costs, and delivering data, often requires continuous manual input and monitoring from geospatial developers at every step of the way.
Many companies over the years (including us here at UP42) have facilitated the shift towards an API-first approach for building geospatial solutions. Solution builders can automate a significant portion of their current workflows and data pipelines by accessing a single package of API endpoints that supports data and processing operations.
As our product offerings expanded over the past couple of years, we sought new ways to empower our developer customers. Many API users often manage geospatial workflows with multiple data orders and jobs running concurrently - but they lack automatic notifications about the progress of their workflows. Therefore, we’re excited to announce the launch of Event Notifications with Webhooks on the UP42 platform.
Event Notifications With Webhooks
Event Notifications with Webhooks is the latest addition to the UP42 offering for geospatial developers. Our customers can now set up automated status updates for their jobs and orders on the UP42 platform by easily configuring webhooks. These webhooks are automatically triggered whenever there is a job or order status change, and an event notification is transmitted via HTTPS to a specific URL.
Let’s take the example of a geospatial developer who has placed multiple orders for geospatial imagery with a data provider. They need the latest notifications on the status of their orders. Without webhooks, they must rely on manual API polling to get the latest updates. But this is a time-consuming and error-prone process, and can break down quickly as operations scale.
With webhooks, this developer can immediately simplify their work. The UP42 webhooks alert developers whenever a job changes its task status, or a new data order is finalized. These event notifications are a real time-saver for developers - they no longer need to set up and maintain additional supervision services. By notifying developers of platform events in an API-first way, we’ve further reduced the complexity of developing geospatial solutions.
How Can You Set It Up?
You can sign up for free and log in to the UP42 console here, if you haven't already. We offer 10k free credits at signup, so you can explore the console and discover the wide variety of data and processing solutions on offer. As a developer-first platform, we’ve also got extensive documentation around our API and Python SDK ecosystem so you can get up and running fast.
Currently, there are two critical events for which you can get notifications via webhooks on UP42.
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Job task status - This webhook is triggered by the job launch. Once the job begins, each job task is automatically assigned a status, depending on its progress.
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Order status - This webhook is triggered when an order gets placed, and alerts the user as to whether the order was completed successfully or failed.
Once you get familiar with the UP42 platform and the two events described above, you’ll be ready to create webhooks. The table below outlines the default parameters you would need to get started. You’ll need to insert these parameters in JSON format into the request body that you create.
Our API reference guide for webhooks will walk you through the step-by-step process and provides more context by displaying the Request and Response samples in JSON format.
Request sample for creating webhooks:
Response sample:
Once you’ve created webhooks with the necessary parameters, you can test them to ensure that you receive successful alerts. You can use the API reference guide to access the commands for testing webhooks, making updates, and deleting an existing webhook.
What’s Coming up Next?
We consistently strive to simplify the end-to-end process involved in purchasing geospatial data for our customers. Event Notifications with Webhooks will play a significant part in further streamlining the current data delivery process. We’re currently adding more events for you to configure via webhooks. We also want to empower you to set up and manage webhooks yourself, so stay tuned–more updates are coming soon.
