First Architect Certification. My Tips and Takeaways from the Integration Architecture Designer Examination

I’ve been holding off taking the Architect exams until I got the Platform Devoper II done and dusted which I did last month. This is my first ever Architect certificate. I’ve set out a journey to be a Certified Technical Architect #journeyToCTA, the pinnacle of Salesforce Certification. I have a lined up my certification goals for the coming months.

I recommend having implemented at least a data integration or system integration project before sitting down this exam. Same with other exams its 60 + 5 extra questions.. 105 minutes allotted and passing score of 67%. Questions are 80+% scenario based, take your time reading through them, I only had 12 mins spare.

Here is how I prepared for the Integration Architecture Designer exam.

Grab Certification Exam Guide
Download the Integration Architecture Resource Guide
Focus on the following
- Do the Data Integration Superbadge
- Outbound Messaging (features, limitations, use of callbacks)
- SOAP API (When to use, contract-first, limits, Enterprise and Partner WSDL, getting deltas, data replication, limits)
- REST API
- Bulk API (lots of questions, LDV, parallel, serial)
- Streaming API
- Metadata API
- Integration Patterns (lots of scenarios)
  - Remote Call Invocation – Request and Reply
  - Remote Call Invocation – Fire and Forget
  - UI Update on Data Change
  - Batch Synchronization
- Continuation and Long Running Calls
- Visualforce
- Canvas Apps
- Apex Web Services
- Apex REST API
- Named Credentials ( Per User)
- Concurrent Requests
- API Limits
- Middleware (lots of questions, orchestration, when to recommend, change data capture, ETL, MDM)
- Security ( TLS, Certificates, Base64 encoding)
- Einstein Analytics(Dataflow, data source)
- Mock Test Classes (Static resource)
- UAT, Testing and Perfomance
- Authentication (Session ids, OAuth)
- Matching and Duplications Rules
- Lightning Connect (as per Summer 18, some features are already possible eg. write)
- Enterprise Architecture(Queueing, Messaging, ESB)