Sometimes microservices have to be flexible and support multiple formats. For example, some modern clients use JSON, but some need XML or another format. In this section, we'll improve our microservices by adding the Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) serialization format.
CBOR is a binary data serialization format based on JSON. It's more compact, supports binary strings, works faster, and is defined as a standard. You can read more about this at https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7049.