Very much this. We do that at my current job. We use protos to: 1. Define configuration options for all services/devices 2. Define data models 3. Persist them

Very much this. We do that at my current job. We use protos to: 1. Define configuration options for all services/devices 2. Define data models 3. Persist them into our DB: https://github.com/CaperAi/pronto https://github.com/CaperAi/pronto 4. Define our APIs It's extremely convenient to have a single source of truth.