Protobuf

Protobuf. Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is Google’s language-neutral binary serialization format.

Blurb

Protocol Buffers are language-neutral, platform-neutral extensible mechanisms for serializing structured data.

Summary

Garden stance: We trial Protobuf for our estate.

Key points: The tradeoff is observability: binary payloads aren’t human-readable without tooling, which complicates debugging and log inspection. For this reason Protobuf is best suited to high-throughput internal service-to-service communication where performance matters , not for public-facing APIs or anywhere humans need to read the wire format directly.