Great question! We specifically started with connectors/plugins to cloud infrastructure providers and other infrastructure vendors - This is why most of our users migrated and/or compared us to the tools specified here (https://www.cloudquery.io/docs/cq-vs-others/overview).

There are no connectors for AWS, GCP, Azure in FiveTran, Airbyte, Meltano but as we extend the number of our source plugins I believe this question will come up more and we will add those products as well to our comparison list.

The protocol is just standard/plain gRPC (https://www.cloudquery.io/docs/developers/architecture). Protobuf is defined here - https://github.com/cloudquery/plugin-sdk/tree/main/internal/...

Basically just the normalized, verified data + metadata, types

understood :) thanks for the reply

Will you adopt the singer interfaces? That's what Meltano does, and it's chefs kiss.

Interesting. We will take a look at this even though we usually build our own connectors due the huge concurrency/speed advantages when using CloudQuery SDK.

Much more of a focus on security and infrastructure than other EL tools. Like these security policies for example - https://www.cloudquery.io/docs/core-concepts/policies