JSON is great for human readability, but once you’re exchanging high volumes of messages between internal services, its verbosity becomes a real issue.
That’s where Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) come in. Around this time, I started replacing JSON with Protobuf in our gRPC-based services. The results were significant — payload sizes dropped by over 60% and response times improved.
Sample
.proto file:syntax = "proto3"; message Product { string id = 1; string name = 2; float price = 3; }
Using it in Java was simple with Maven plugins. One thing I learned early — versioning matters. Backward compatibility isn’t a given unless you respect field numbering rules.
Overall, Protobuf has been an excellent fit for internal communication, while we still serve JSON externally.