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Message Formats

JSON, Protobuf, Avro — schema evolution and payload economics.

3Questions
8Flashcards
2Terms
Drill this topic All of API & Integration Architecture
Questions

3 to work through

  1. intermediate Multiple choice

    A telemetry platform ingests billions of events daily from customer agents. Which message format should the wire protocol use, and what does the choice affect beyond size?

    2 min answer
  2. intermediate Multiple choice

    An events pipeline carries 2 billion events a day. Each event is JSON with 25 fields whose names average 14 characters. Roughly how many bytes a day go on field names alone, before compression?

    2 min answer
  3. advanced

    A producer team wants to rename a field in a published event schema. What do you tell them and what makes the answer enforceable?

    2 min answer
Terminology

2 terms in this topic

concept

Binary Serialisation

Encoding messages compactly using a schema rather than as self-describing text, trading readability for size and parse speed.

 concept

Message Formats

JSON, Protobuf, Avro and the rest — chosen by who the consumer is and how the schema will evolve.
API & Integration Architecture

Neighbouring topics

API & Integration

General material on integrating systems through contracts.

4 quiz 15 cards 13 terms

REST Design

Resources, uniform methods, status codes and statelessness.

4 quiz 7 cards 3 terms

GraphQL

Client-specified queries, N+1 resolution and query-cost control.

4 quiz 9 cards 4 terms

gRPC APIs

Contract-first RPC, generated clients and protobuf compatibility rules.

3 quiz 8 cards 3 terms

Webhooks

Push callbacks, signature verification, ordering and at-least-once delivery.

5 quiz 12 cards 7 terms

API Versioning

URL, header and account-pinned versioning, and who carries the burden.

5 quiz 9 cards 5 terms

Backward Compatibility

Which changes are safe, and how to make breakage a build failure.

3 quiz 6 cards 3 terms

Contract Testing

Verifying what consumers actually rely on, without a shared environment.

5 quiz 12 cards 2 terms

API Documentation

OpenAPI as a machine-checked contract rather than as prose.

4 quiz 5 cards 2 terms

Rate Limiting

Algorithms, shared counters, and signalling rejection properly.

4 quiz 12 cards 4 terms

Idempotency Keys

Client-generated keys stored atomically with the operation they guard.

5 quiz 7 cards 3 terms

Pagination & Filtering

Offset versus cursor, stable ordering and unbounded result sets.

4 quiz 7 cards 3 terms

API Error Handling

Error shapes, retryability signals and machine-readable causes.

3 quiz 11 cards 4 terms

Event-Driven Integration

Publishing facts rather than commands, and versioning event schemas.

4 quiz 11 cards 5 terms

Schema Registry

Enforcing compatibility on events the way CI enforces it on code.

2 quiz 7 cards 4 terms

Integration Patterns

Routers, translators, splitters, aggregators and dead letter channels.

3 quiz 8 cards 6 terms

Legacy Integration

Reaching systems that cannot change, without importing their model.

4 quiz 11 cards 3 terms

Partner & B2B Integration

External contracts, onboarding, sandboxes and long deprecation windows.

4 quiz 9 cards 3 terms

APIs as Products

Ownership, lifecycle, deprecation policy and developer experience.

5 quiz 12 cards 3 terms