What it is
A notification delivery pipeline turns a raw event into a message a person actually receives. Between the event and the inbox sit several stages that decide whether, how, and where to deliver.
The stages
- Trigger: an event such as a new comment enters the pipeline.
- Preferences: the user settings decide if they even want this notification.
- Formatting: the event becomes readable text for the chosen channel.
- Channel selection: the message is routed to in app, email, or push.
Why staging matters
Each stage is a place to drop noise. Preference checks suppress unwanted alerts, deduplication collapses repeats, and rate limiting stops a flood. Separating stages also lets each scale and fail independently.
Reliability
- Persist the event so a crash mid pipeline can retry from a known stage.
- Make delivery idempotent so a retry does not send a duplicate notification.
Key idea
A notification delivery pipeline routes an event through preference checks, formatting, and channel selection, with each stage able to suppress noise and retry safely on failure.