Am I reading this right that it's a binary format for real-time streaming data, similar to Avro, but can include arbitrarily deep nested structures unlike Avro?
Ion originated 10+ years ago from the Amazon catalog team - the team that kept data about the hundreds of millions of items available on Amazon. Nearly every team in the company called the catalog to get information about items all the time - scanning the entire catalog, parts of the catalog, millions of individual item lookups every second, etc.
They did the math and some very large percentage of network traffic in Amazon Retails data centers was catalog data. If that data, currently in XML or JSON format, was sent in a more compact format it would save some ridiculous millions of dollars every year. So Ion was born and eventually open sourced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1
which is forgotten but not gone.
I hadn’t thought about it in like a decade but yeah it’s still silently in the background…
- Avro and Ion are the only two that are labeled Textual/Binary
- They are in the same Big Data grouping
- They both are schema-embedded, and support some rich nested datastructures, though they deviate on many of the specifics
So I think it's reasonable to pick out Avro as an especially similar point of comparison.