CommunityProtobuf Explained

Community

Protocol Buffers started at Google in 2001 and was open-sourced in 2008. Today it is widely used for APIs between services. The Editions page traces that history release by release.

Protobuf in Production

Each of these companies and projects has either published its Protobuf definitions or written about how it uses them. Many more companies use Protobuf for internal APIs, and most of those schemas stay in private repositories.

Anthropic

Anthropic built and open-sourced a zero-copy Protobuf runtime and a ConnectRPC implementation for Rust, both already running in production there.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA's Triton Inference Server defines its inference, model metadata, and repository APIs as a Protobuf gRPC service.

Netflix

Netflix uses gRPC between its backend services, and its engineers have written about using Protobuf's FieldMask to shape requests and responses.

Spotify

Spotify moved thousands of backend services off its in-house messaging protocol and onto gRPC with Protobuf service definitions.

DoorDash

DoorDash uses gRPC as the standard protocol between its microservices, with reliability settings declared as options in the service definitions.

Square

Square built and maintains Wire, its own Protobuf implementation for Android, Kotlin, Java, and Swift.

Bluesky

Bluesky's app server reads from its data plane over ConnectRPC, with the internal API defined in Protobuf.

Grafana Labs

Grafana Pyroscope, the continuous profiling database, defines its APIs in Protobuf and serves them with ConnectRPC.

CockroachDB

CockroachDB's internal key-value API is a Protobuf gRPC service. SQL queries are translated into calls to it.

Google

Google's API design guidance is built around resource-oriented APIs with Protobuf service definitions and HTTP/JSON transcoding.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes documents Protobuf as an alternate API encoding for built-in resources, alongside JSON.

Envoy Proxy

Envoy's xDS APIs and configuration resources are published as versioned Protobuf API references.

Docker / Swarm

SwarmKit keeps its control-plane API definitions in Protobuf schemas in the project source.

Vitess

Vitess publishes Protobuf definitions for its query, tablet, topology, and automation APIs.

Etcd

Etcd exposes a gRPC API with a gRPC-gateway that maps HTTP/JSON onto the same API surface.

TiDB

The TiDB/TiKV ecosystem maintains shared Protobuf definitions for distributed storage APIs in kvproto.

OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry defines its cross-language telemetry data protocol in shared Protobuf schemas.

Temporal

Temporal publishes the API definitions for its workflow platform as Protobuf schemas.

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