> every time a component needs to talk to another component a new protocol was invented

> We actually spent considerable amount of time just developing our own custom protocol

Not only is this unintentionally hilarious, it’s a real life example of an xkcd comic (https://xkcd.com/927/) that will never cease to be true.

> eventually all our data communication would use a single unified protocol from micro-controller to IoT Linux to cloud data-ingestion pipeline to database.

This, however, is remarkably impressive, that you were able to build a single protocol that fit this end to end use case.