Protocol Buffer & gRPC Protocol buffers are a data serialization format that allows structured data to be converted into a format that can be stored or shared across systems. It provides a compact binary format that is faster and smaller than JSON. Protocol buffers use an IDL (interface description language) to define the schema, which is then used to generate code for reading and writing protocol buffer data in multiple languages. gRPC is an open source RPC framework developed by Google that uses protocol buffers for data serialization and HTTP/2 for transport. It supports various types of interactions including unary, server-streaming, client-streaming, and bidirectional streaming.