JSON and HTTP are simple, straightforward solutions for data transportation and definition that should serve the purposes of many microservice architectures. If you want type safety and often better performance, however, it can be worthwhile to look at binary solutions such as Thrift or gRPC.
Apache Thrift is an interface definition language (IDL) and binary transport protocol invented at Facebook. It allows you to specify APIs by defining the structs (which are similar to objects in most languages) and exceptions that your service exposes. Thrift interfaces defined in the IDL are used to generate code in a supported language that is then used to manage the RPC calls. Supported languages include C, C++, Python, Ruby, and Java.
The benefits of a binary protocol such as Thrift are primarily improved performance and type safety. Depending on the JSON library...
