A newer competitor to Thrift, and also under the Apache umbrella, Avro offers similar functionality but with very different design tradeoffs. You still define a schema for your data and the interfaces you’ll use, but instead of being held separately within each program, the schema is transmitted alongside the data. That makes it possible to write code that can handle arbitrary data structures, rather than only the types that were known when the program was created.
This flexibility does come at the cost of space and performance efficiency when encoding and decoding the information. Avro schemas are defined using JSON, which can feel a bit clunky compared to more domain-specific IDLs, though there is experimental support for a more user-friendly format known as Avro IDL.
