Core Architectural Concepts: Integration and Cryptography

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In this chapter, you will continue to discover the general architectural concepts that...

Integration in the Enterprise: Understanding the Landscape

The digital enterprise landscape is continuously becoming more sophisticated. Gone are the days when the enterprise used to have less than 10 systems covering most of its business processes. Today’s enterprises have hundreds, if not thousands, of different applications that are bought, built in-house, or combined. This is in addition to a set of legacy systems that are still surviving the axe. Nowadays, it is very common to find that an enterprise has dozens of websites, multiple instances of ERP systems, and many other departmental applications, in addition to several data warehouses or lakes.

One of the reasons why enterprises end up in such situations is the complexity associated with building business applications. Building a single application that runs all business processes is nearly impossible. Maintaining it, adapting to day-to-day business challenges, and requesting changes are even more challenging. Breaking...

Introducing Common Integration Styles

When designing an integration architecture between two or more systems, the key challenge is how to achieve that. There are some common integration styles that architects should be familiar with. You need to have basic knowledge of them and understand how and when to use each style. In today’s world, some of these integration styles have evolved and are used as part of modern enterprise integration platforms. Next, you will become familiar with the file transfer, unified datastore, remote procedure invocation (RPI), messaging, and mashup integration styles.

File Transfer

In this integration style, applications produce a file containing the data that other applications would consume. This file is normally in a format that can be read by all the target systems and shared in a repository that can be accessed by all concerned systems. These systems are responsible for transforming the file into any other format they are expecting, while...

Discussing Different Integration Tools

Before discussing some of the common types of integration tools available today, you need to understand why these tools are necessary. As a Salesforce Architect, you are expected to guide the client and the integration team when it comes to selecting the right set of tools that support the agreed integration strategy. You should be able to challenge sub-optimal design decisions based on valid logic and rationale. Picking the wrong tool or opting for shortcuts without considering their potential impact could prove to be very costly, and this might impact the project/program in multiple ways and become a major risk to the success of your Salesforce implementation. During the CTA review board, you are always expected to justify why you selected your integration tools.

Historically, a common way to integrate two applications together is through a direct channel with no third-party app or mediator in between. This can be done with point-to-point...

Exploring Modern Integration Approaches

The technological landscape is ever-changing, and as a Salesforce Architect, you deal with modern tools and technologies every day. It is very important to align the topics you covered earlier with today’s modern integration approaches. Some of these approaches have lost popularity, but their concepts are still the basis of other modern approaches.

To fully understand the modern integration approaches and be able to lead discussions with your client, enterprise architects, and integration architects about the most appropriate integration strategy to use, you need to have a wide knowledge of today’s modern integration approaches, in addition to a deep and solid understanding of their foundations. Sometimes, technology enthusiasts get carried away with new concepts and terminology. While staying up to date with the latest market trends is important, as a senior architect, you need to understand which of these approaches is most...

Cryptography: Understanding the General Concepts

Cryptography has a tight relationship with other architectural domains, such as integration and identity and access management (IAM). It also has strong relationships with data. As a Salesforce Architect, you need to have a general understanding of the value of cryptography and different types of cryptography algorithms and a high-level understanding of the process. This will help you understand the intricacies of the day-to-day activities that take place in Salesforce implementation projects, such as securing an integration channel using Transport Layer Security (TLS) or two-way TLS (also known as mutual authentication), or how authentication tokens are digitally signed.

Encryption is the process of converting original readable data (also known as plaintext) into a form that cannot be read by unauthorized parties (also known as ciphertext). Encryption is not a method of preventing others from interfering with data; rather, it is...

Summary

In this chapter, you started by looking at the general concepts surrounding integration before moving on and looking at some of the old and modern integration approaches. You achieved this by looking at different types of tools and mechanisms. You also learned about some ideal use cases for each of these tools.

You then moved on to a related architectural topic, that is, security and cryptography. You learned about some key concepts in the wide and complex world of cryptography and tied them back to some real-world examples that you may come across regularly. Finally, you tied all this together and learned how integration and cryptography can work side by side in the enterprise landscape.

In the next chapter, you will cover another key architectural concept. IAM architectural concepts are now extensively used in modern distributed solutions. These IAM concepts are closely related to both the integration and encryption domains, and they are common in cloud-based solutions...

Chapter Review Flashcards

Before you proceed to the next chapter, it is recommended that you go through the flashcards from this chapter first. These flashcards condense all the chapter concepts into smaller and easily manageable chunks that will help you with quick review and retention. By engaging with these flashcards, you will strengthen your understanding of key topics, identify areas that require further study, and build your confidence before moving on to new concepts.

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