Protocol Buffer Concepts

Overview

Protocol buffers is a format used for data serialization, publicly introduced by Google in 2008. The benefits of using Protocol Buffers include the simplicity of the definition language, a small data output size, high performance of serialization and deserialization and the ability to define derives in addition to data structures and compile client and server code in multiple languages.

Protocol Buffer can be used as serialization format for microservices. Additionally, the Protocol Buffer schema languages allows declaring service APIs. Code for those services can then be generated automatically.

gRPC uses Protocol Buffers as serialization format.