His point about protocol buffers (i.e. schema-out-of-band protocols) is unfortunately brief in this talk. Depending on your use case, you may have to do a lot

His point about protocol buffers (i.e. schema-out-of-band protocols) is unfortunately brief in this talk. Depending on your use case, you may have to do a lot to work around protocol buffers not being self-describing. I haven't seen a good description of the problem online, but if you find yourself embedding JSON data in protobufs to avoid patching middleware services constantly, you should look at something like Avro or MessagePack or Amazon Ion.