Protocol Buffers

Protocol Buffer is language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data in a forward-compatible and backward-compatible way.

• Useful for ephemeral network traffic and long-term data storage.
• Protocol buffers allow for the seamless support of changes, including the addition of new fields and the deletion of existing fields, to any protocol buffer without breaking existing services.
• old code will read new messages without issues, ignoring any newly added fields. To the old code, fields that were deleted will have their default value, and deleted repeated fields will be empty
• when working with larger data, you may effectively end up with several copies of the data due to serialized copies, which can cause surprising spikes in memory usage.
• Messages are not compressed
• don't inherently self-describe their data,