Amazon Ion
Amazon Ion is a data format designed by AWS that supports both text and binary representations with identical semantics, and is a superset of JSON.
Purpose
It gives AWS services (QLDB, Step Functions) a richly typed, self-describing data representation interchangeable between text and binary.
Mechanism
Text Ion resembles JSON but adds comments, S-expressions, timestamps, and blobs; binary Ion uses compact tag-based encoding that is semantically equivalent to text Ion, and the two are freely convertible.
Use cases
- AWS QLDB data
- Step Functions states
- Richly typed configuration