Managing Items as Resources in Sitecore xmCloud
As you may know for a while Sitecore uses Items as resources for deployment (IAR). Sitecore uses Protobuf to generate static read-only serialized items.
Protocol Buffers (a.k.a., protobuf) are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. You can learn more about it in protobuf's documentation. You