I'm currently working on a project where I need to serialize bytes of data and store them on disk for later deserialization. The challenge is that the EC2 instance types I use for serialization and deserialization could be different, so I want to avoid any endianness issues (like serializing in little-endian and deserializing in big-endian). I know that endianness depends on the underlying hardware, but I'm not sure what hardware configurations are used for all the different AWS instances. Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
2 Answers
It's crucial to specify your desired endianness during serialization and deserialization. Most modern serialization libraries can handle this for you, so if you're using a library, make sure to check its documentation. On the other hand, if you're coding this yourself, you can select which endianness performs better for your needs, though often the performance difference is negligible.
For AWS EC2 instances, network byte order is always big-endian, which is likely what you're after. When it comes to memory byte order, that depends on the CPU architecture. AWS primarily uses two architectures: Intel/AMD (x86_64) and Graviton (ARM64). Just keep in mind that your serialization method should be clear about which endianness you expect.
Got it! So if I stick to big-endian for serialization, I should be fine across different instance types, right?
Thanks for the tip! I'll look into the libraries that handle it to save some time.