Data Formats
Every time you make an API call, store a file, or send a message in a distributed system, a fundamental question must be answered: "How should this data be represented?"
That’s where data formats come in.
A data format is the contract that defines how information is structured, stored, and exchanged between different parts of a system.
In the world of microservices and large-scale data processing, this choice is not trivial. The right format can make your system fast, efficient, and scalable, while the wrong one can introduce latency, bloat storage costs, and create compatibility nightmares.
The impact of a serialization format is felt across the system:
- Performance: How fast can we encode and decode data?
- Size: How much space does the data occupy on disk or over the network?
- Compatibility: Can systems written in different languages easily understand each other?
- Evolvability: How easily can we change the data structure over time without breaking things?
Let’s explore how data formats evolved from human-readable text to compact binary representations and learn how to pick the right one for your system.