[leef]

Ion has a binary format but is not specifically about real-time streaming. It is a JSON replacement.

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.