Protobuf parsing in Python

Recently, the Datadog Agent was extended to support extracting additional metrics from Kubernetes using the kube-state-metrics service. Metrics are exported through an HTTP API that supports content negotiation so that one can choose between having the response body in plain text format or as a binary stream encoded using Protocol buffers. The article provides a detailed introduction to Protocol buffers, including its advantages and disadvantages. It also discusses benchmarking results for encoding and decoding messages with Protobuf and plain text formats. In conclusion, the use of Protobuf can significantly improve performance when dealing with complex data structures in Kubernetes state checks.