Discovering landscape systems, protocols and boundaries
How 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.
Given a set of business requirements, identify the current system landscape and determine what standards, limitations, boundaries, and protocols exist.
~8 min read · 8 practice questions ·
What the exam expects
- Choose the first step when an integration landscape is undocumented: build a current-state system landscape before picking any tool.
- Ask the decision guide's "Existing Tools and Landscape" questions (existing ESB or ETL, regulated data, cloud or on-premises) and reject questions that belong to later design steps.
- Classify each external system's protocol as callable directly from Apex (SOAP with WSDL, HTTP/REST) or needing middleware (SFTP files, message queues, JDBC).
- Flag edition limits on API access, such as Professional Edition needing the API add-on.
- Separate what Salesforce secures from what the customer secures for integrations, and record vendor dependencies and platform limits that bound the design.
Key terms: system landscape (a diagram of the systems, integration points and their relationships), callout (Apex calling an external SOAP or HTTP service), Shared Responsibility Model (Salesforce secures the platform, the customer secures what runs on it), flex queue (where extra Batch Apex jobs wait in Holding status), Event Relay (a managed stream from the Salesforce event bus to Amazon EventBridge).
Key facts
- Detail
- Diagram the current-state system landscape: systems, integration points, relationships
- Detail
- Existing ESB/ETL? Regulatory data? Cloud or on-premises?
- Detail
- SOAP/WSDL web services and HTTP (RESTful) services
- Detail
- Add-on required; otherwise
API_DISABLED_FOR_ORG
- Detail
- Counts toward the same API allocation as REST and SOAP
- Detail
- Integration authentication, named credentials, least-privilege integration users
- Detail
- Escalation path, contractual SLA, support hours per critical vendor
- Detail
- 5 queued or active; 100 Holding in the flex queue
- Detail
- Amazon EventBridge only
Sources for this section (8)
- System Landscapearchitect.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Data Integration with Salesforcearchitect.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Invoking Callouts Using Apexdeveloper.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Supported Editions and Required Permissionsdeveloper.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- API Request Limits and Allocationsdeveloper.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Well-Architected: Trustarchitect.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Well-Architected: Reliabilityarchitect.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Execution Governors and Limitsdeveloper.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Why does the architect diagram the current landscape before choosing a tool?
- When does a system need middleware rather than an Apex callout?
- What error does an API request to an org without API access return?
- Why record which vendors offer only business-hours support?
The questions are free to read. Answers with their sources and self-grading are included with the pack.
Keep reading with the Integration Architect pack
- Core concepts
- Exam traps
- Worked scenario
The pack includes:
- All 25 lessons of the Integration Architect guide, with reading progress
- Interactive decision walks and step-by-step sequence steppers
- Inline practice questions and one-click topic practice (8 questions for this lesson)
- An official source cited for every claim
- An AI tutor that answers from the guide
- Unlimited timed practice exams