In one of our client projects, we were using JSON as a default message format for data interchange between various distributed services. We were sending out large amounts and frequently updated data among our distributed services. So, we were evaluating other formats (eg. MessagePack, Protobuf, BSON) to compact message size and improve the performance. After completing our evaluation, we finalized Protobuf as our default message format.
Protobuf is the binary format crafted by Google which surpasses JSON performance (i.e. it is smaller, faster, and simpler). It is a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data.