Hadoop I/O - Hadoop: The Definitive Guide - page 150

Apache Thrift a nd Google Protocol Buffers are both popular serialization frameworks,
and both are commonly used as a format for persistent binary data. There is limited sup-
port for these as MapReduce formats; [ 46 ] however, they are used internally in parts of Ha-
doop for RPC and data exchange.
Avro is an IDL-based serialization framework designed to work well with large-scale data
processing in Hadoop. It is covered in Chapter 12 .