Protobufs

Protocol buffers or protobufs are a binary format created by Google. Google defines protobufs as a language and platform neutral extensive way of serializing structured data that can be used as one of the communication protocols. Protobufs also defines a set of some language rules that define the structure of messages. Some demonstrations effectively show that protobufs is six times faster than JSON. It is very easy to implement and it involves three major stages, which are creating message descriptors, message implementations, and parsing and serialization. Using protobufs in your microservices gives you the following advantages:

• Formats for protobufs are self-explaining—formal formats.
• It has RPC support; you can declare server RPC interfaces as part of protocol files.
• It has an option for structure validation. As it has larger datatype messages that are serialized on protobufs, it can be validated automatically by the code that is responsible for exchanging them.

While the protobuf pattern offers various advantages, it has some drawbacks, which are as follows:

• It is an upcoming pattern; hence you won't find many resources or detailed documentation for implementation of protobuf. If you just look for the protobuf tag on Stack Overflow, you will merely see a mere 10,000 questions.
• As it's binary format, it's non-readable when compared to JSON, which is simple to read and analyze on the other hand. The next generation of protobuf and flatbuffer is already available now.