Integration Architect Study Guide
The CertifyForce Integration Architect study guide covers the official Salesforce Integration Architect exam outline in 25 units across all 6 exam sections, one unit per exam-guide topic. The exam itself has 60 scored questions plus 5 unscored, a 105-minute limit and a 67% passing score, and its largest section is Design Integration Solutions at 28%. Every unit is verified against official Salesforce documentation, cites its sources, and links to the practice questions that test it. Last updated October 16, 2026.
Designing integration solutions between Salesforce and external systems: evaluating the landscape and business needs, translating them into integration requirements, choosing patterns and APIs, building secure and resilient solutions, and maintaining them.
25 lessons · 6 exam sections · about 3 h of reading ·
Exam sections
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Every lesson's summary, exam expectations, key facts and self-check questions are free to read. The Integration Architect pack unlocks the self-check answers, core concepts, exam traps and worked scenarios, reading progress, personalized “read next”, and unlimited practice exams.
Evaluate the Current System Landscape
8% of the exam- Discovering landscape systems, protocols and boundaries~8 minHow an integration architect documents the current landscape before designing anything: the system landscape diagram, the decision guide's discovery questions, which protocols Apex can call without middleware, edition API access, the shared responsibility boundary, vendor dependencies and Event Relay's single target.
- Diagnosing landscape pain points and platform constraints~8 minReading an existing landscape for the constraint behind a symptom: API usage against the 70% headroom ceiling, which org pays for cross-org Salesforce Connect callouts, OData join and throttling limits, the daily async Apex limit, synchronous coupling, org-bound platform events, browser-side Omniscript callouts and source systems that only export nightly files.
- SSO, delegated authentication and identity federation~8 minMatching the landscape's identity systems to the right Salesforce mechanism: delegated authentication, Salesforce as SAML service provider (with JIT provisioning) or identity provider, the SAML assertion and asset token flows, token introspection, renewing client credentials tokens after a 401, and Headless Identity APIs.
Evaluate Business Needs
11% of the exam- Functional and non-functional integration requirements~8 minHow to sort integration requirements into what the integration does and how well it must do it, which requirements decide timing (wait, fire, batch or events), and how to turn vague availability, cost and support wishes into measurable objectives.
- Classifying data as Public, Confidential or Secure~7 minHow to place integration data in the Public, Confidential and Secure tiers, record the tier on each field with Data Sensitivity Level and Compliance Categorization, read it from middleware through FieldDefinition, and turn each tier into concrete controls such as data minimization and mutual TLS.
- Integration requirements that drive CRM adoption~8 minWhich integration requirements make or break CRM adoption: surfacing external data in Salesforce without needless replication, a system of record per field, acceptable latency per data set, visible exception handling, a separate historical load, one API Only integration user per integration, and reuse of an existing ESB.
- Growth, residency and compliance factors~8 minHow expected growth (acquisitions, tenfold volume) and regulation (data residency, GDPR transfers, GDPR and CCPA consent, HIPAA, PCI DSS) change which integration solution fits, from a hub or event bus instead of point-to-point links to Shield, Field Audit Trail, tokenization and consent-aware Data 360 activation.
Translate Needs to Integration Requirements
22% of the exam- Inventorying interfaces with the integration pattern catalog~8 minHow to turn a landscape diagram into an integration inventory: classify each interface against the six Salesforce integration patterns by direction, timing and storage, record its type, layer and key-tracking approach, and flag legacy mechanisms for modernization.
- Network, locking, ordering and transaction constraints~8 minWhich design each system or process constraint forces: who opens the connection through a firewall, where multi-system transactions and compensation live, idempotent inbound writes, record-lock contention in loads, Change Data Capture ordering, throttled or offline targets, and capability checks on the other system.
- OAuth flow selection and integration access controls~8 minPick the OAuth 2.0 flow from three questions about the client, plan for the username-password flow's retirement and the connected app creation restriction, and set least-privilege access, app session policies, real-time blocking, CORS and field-level protection for each integration.
- Sizing volumes, latency and API allocations~8 minSize an integration against its limits: daily API request arithmetic by edition and license, platform event publishing versus delivery allocations, event filters and parallel subscriptions, Bulk API 2.0 throughput levers, latency levers from gzip to Platform Cache and SOSL, callout timeouts, ownership skew and large file uploads.
Design Integration Solutions
28% of the exam- Choosing the integration pattern for a requirement~8 minHow to pick the integration pattern from the requirement itself: who initiates, whether anyone waits, whether the data must live in Salesforce and how much of it moves; when to virtualize instead of replicate, how to give a remote system an asynchronous call-in, which event-driven pattern fits, and what replaces Salesforce to Salesforce.
- Solution components: Salesforce Connect, Flow and middleware~8 minWhich building blocks make up an integration once the pattern is chosen: Salesforce Connect adapters and external object relationships, External Services, flow invocable actions and Flow Orchestration, platform event and Change Data Capture payload design, WSDL proxy classes, ETL design elements, Heroku Connect, and the middleware capabilities each pattern needs.
- Trade-offs and platform limits of integration options~8 minThe limits and trade-offs that decide whether an integration survives production: long-running request and callout limits, Salesforce Connect and External Services constraints, event retention, CDC entity limits, Bulk API 2.0 transactions, query cursors, outbound message retries, partial success behind HTTP 200 and Well-Architected trade-offs.
- Choosing the Salesforce API for a requirement~7 minHow to pick the Salesforce API from volume, timing, payload and audience: REST vs SOAP and the two WSDLs, the Composite family, Bulk API 2.0 vs the original Bulk API (Serial mode, automatic PK chunking, queryAll), Pub/Sub API vs Streaming API, Metadata and Tooling API, UI, Connect, GraphQL and Analytics APIs, the Limits resource, and when custom Apex REST is justified.
- Credentials, certificates and private connectivity~8 minThe security components an integration design specifies: External Client App OAuth setup for JWT bearer and client credentials, Permitted Users and IP policies, named and external credentials (Basic, Custom API keys, Per User OAuth), mutual TLS in both directions, Private Connect, Event Bus encryption, HMAC webhook checks, publish behavior, and what stays in middleware.
Build Solution
23% of the exam- Building Apex REST and SOAP services and clients~8 minWhat to consider when Salesforce provides a custom API (system context and how to enforce sharing and field security, API allocation, package namespaces, unsupported content types, heap-safe responses, WSDL from webservice methods) and when it consumes one (SOAP 1.1 only, no WS-Security in generated classes, idempotency keys, response size limits and paginated APIs).
- Choosing an outbound callout mechanism~8 minHow to pick the way Salesforce calls out: named credential endpoints and the callout: scheme, synchronous versus Queueable, future and platform event subscribers, callouts after uncommitted DML, async request plus callback for long jobs, outbound message versus platform event delivery, Event Relay to Amazon EventBridge, Flow HTTP Callout limits and Named Principal versus Per User identity.
- Scaling integrations with bulk, async and big objects~8 minWhat makes an integration scale: Bulk API 2.0 versus bulkified REST by volume and latency, cutting API calls with composite requests, automatic PK chunking for big extracts, Batch Apex concurrency and callout sizing, bulkified triggers and the shared async limit, 70% headroom with production-scale load tests, big objects for long-term logs and event fan-out for new consumers.
- Error handling for events, Apex jobs and APIs~8 minMatch each integration option to its documented error-handling mechanism: publish results and callbacks for platform events, checkpoints and retryable exceptions for event triggers, Pub/Sub API stream retries and flow control, finalizers and BatchApexErrorEvent for Apex jobs, partial success for REST collections, and retry rules by failure type.
- Hardening integration tokens, sessions and credentials~7 minSecure inbound integrations with IP rules that JWT bearer always enforces, Permitted Users and Use Any API Client, refresh token policies, jti replay protection, secret rotation, app-level scopes and event permissions; secure outbound callouts with AWS Signature v4 and JWT external credentials and guest-safe named principals.
- Resilience to maintenance, migrations and retirements~7 minKeep integrations running through Salesforce maintenance and change: skip callouts in read-only mode, recover Pub/Sub API clients after releases and org migrations, rebuild local external client apps after sandbox refreshes, plan for retiring APIs and features, and use circuit breakers, My Domain URLs, mTLS and Trust notifications.
Maintain Integration
8% of the exam- Monitoring integration performance with Event Monitoring~8 minMatching each integration symptom to the monitoring source that measures it: Apex Jobs and AsyncApexJob for queued work, API usage notifications and the Limits resource for allocation, the Concurrent Long-Running Apex Limit, Apex Callout, REST API and Bulk API 2.0 event log files for duration, PlatformEventUsageMetric for event delivery, and hourly versus daily log files.
- Recovery and escalation for failed integrations~8 minRecovery procedures per channel: bounded trigger retries and Resume vs Resume from Tip, Pub/Sub resubscribe and republish by correlationKey, failed outbound message Retry, Bulk API 2.0 failed results, CDC gap and overflow events, ETL error tables, Publish Immediately error logs and caller-side Request and Reply errors.
- Reporting on API usage and integration health~6 minChoosing the reporting source by audience and license: an error-log object for business users, the free API Total Usage log downloaded daily, the API Request Limit per Month entitlement, the Event Log File Browser and Event Monitoring Analytics app, external tools fed by CreatedDate with duplicate handling, and Real-Time Event Monitoring's ApiEvent.
Common questions about the Integration Architect study guide
Is the Integration Architect study guide free?
Partly. Every unit's summary and its "What the exam expects", "Key facts" and "Check yourself" sections are free to read without an account. The "Core concepts", "Exam traps" and "Worked scenario" sections, reading progress and unlimited timed mock exams come with the Integration Architect pack (USD $19).
How current is the Integration Architect study guide?
It is written to the current official Salesforce Integration Architect exam outline, and each unit is checked against Salesforce documentation before it is published. The most recent update was October 16, 2026, and every unit shows its own last-updated date.
How does the study guide map to the official Integration Architect exam guide?
There is one unit per topic in the official exam guide, grouped under its 6 weighted sections: Evaluate the Current System Landscape (8%), Evaluate Business Needs (11%), Translate Needs to Integration Requirements (22%), Design Integration Solutions (28%), Build Solution (23%), Maintain Integration (8%). Each unit quotes the exam objective it covers word for word.
How do the practice questions link to the study guide?
Each unit lists the reviewed practice questions that test it (300 questions are linked across the guide), so you can read a topic and practice it in one click. After a practice exam, every missed question links back to the unit that teaches it.