Understanding Avro Compatibility

Photo by Tolga Ulkan on Unsplash

I have recently been working more and more with Avro as a data-interchange format. Avro aims to provide a format that has rich data structures, a fast and compact binary format, integrations with many languages out of the box, and even a remote procedure call (RPC) capability. Avro is a format very similar in spirit to Protobuf, Thrift, MessagePack, etc. They all have fairly similar design goals and just accomplish their tasks…