Serialization

In previous chapters, we have learned how to scaffold Go microservices, create HTTP API endpoints, and set up service discovery to let our microservices commsunicate with each other. This knowledge already provides a solid foundation for building microservices; however, we are going to continue our journey with more advanced topics.

In this chapter, we will explore serialization, a process that allows the encoding and decoding of data for storing or sending between services.

To illustrate how to use serialization, we are going to define data structures transferred between the services using the Protocol Buffers format, which is widely used across the industry and has a simple syntax, as well as very size-efficient encoding.

Finally, we are going to illustrate how you can generate code for the Protocol Buffers structures and demonstrate how efficient Protocol Buffers encoding is compared to some other formats, such as XML and JSON.

In this chapter, we are...