Jira Cloud Performance Enhancement with Protobuf

This Atlassian blog post details the migration of Jira Cloud's Issue Service from JSON to Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) to enhance performance. The switch involved a phased approach to minimise downtime, creating new endpoints and logic to handle both formats concurrently before a complete transition. The results showcased significant improvements: 75% less Memcached CPU usage, 80% smaller data size, and a substantially faster response time. Challenges encountered included Protobuf's handling of null values and incompatibility with Spring's default error controller, which required workarounds. Ultimately, the migration yielded substantial performance gains and reduced infrastructure needs.

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/atlassian-engineering/using-protobuf-to-make-jira-cloud-faster