Protobuf ?

Hello friends this is a follow-up to my earlier post related to gRPC Vs Restconf and as promised below is a quick summary on Protobuf (the idea that made gRPC look so good). 

Before I summarize Protobuf, let's revisit what serialization is?  Serialization is taking a complex data structure and serializing it into a string that can be sent over a connection. The recipient will use the de-serialization process to recover the original data structure. Serialization is also required when you want to save data structure to a file. Some popular forms of serialization are JSON, YAML, XML, and protocol buffers(Protobuf).

Protobuf is a method of serializing data that can be transmitted over wire or be stored in a file. 

Two keywords to remember when we talk about Protobuf - Protobuf is platform-neutral and highly optimized for microservices architecture. 

As of 2019, Google has over 48000 Protobuf message types in 12000 .proto files.

Speed:

Protobuf is faster than XML/JSON serialization as it offloads the description of data in a proto file. 

20-100x times faster than XML 

Network bandwidth:

Protobuf utilizes binary transmission format over string used by JSON/XML thus less bandwidth is required during transmission. 

3-10X smaller than JSON/XML

Throughput:

Protobuf payload size is ~60% smaller than JSON. 

JSON is self-contained while Protobuf utilizes schema(.proto) files to keep a record of data types and schema.

Courtesy: Geoffery Hunter

Backward compatibility: 

Super easy, if the new change does not work move to your last known good proto file schema.

Polyglot support:

Protobuf support many popular programming languages like C#, Go, python, Java, Javascript.

Engineer productivity :

Protobuf support automatic client code generation using code generators, just specify the proto file with the target language.

However, there are times when JSON is a better fit:

 1) Data to be human readable(protobuf is binary)

 2) Data is consumed directly by a web browser(right now there is no support in web-browser for protobuf)

 3) When your server-side application is in javascript.

 4) JSON is self-contained (protobuf needs a proto file) 

Next post gRPC :)

References:

Serialization formats - Geoffrey Hunter

My earlier post on gRPC Vs Restconf