2021-03-06 Saturday - Book Review: Becoming a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect

 

source: Amazon.com

This weekend I reviewed a new book.

Teny Thomas (Marketing Coordinator, Packt Publishing) graciously offered to provide me with a review copy of "Becoming a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect: Prepare for the review board by practicing example-led architectural strategies and best practices", by Tameem Bahri, Chief Technology Officer - Europe (Salesforce.com COE), with Capgemini.

https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Salesforce-Certified-Technical-Architect/dp/1800568754/

My summary: Ambitious - Practical Coverage of the Application of Salesforce Architecture

 

Chapters include:

Chapter 1, Starting Your Journey as a CTA,

Chapter 2, Core Architectural Concepts – Data

Chapter 3, Core Architectural Concepts – Integration and Cryptography

Chapter 4, Core Architectural Concepts – Identity and Access Management

Chapter 5, Developing a Scalable System Architecture

Chapter 6, Formulating a Secure Architecture in Salesforce

Chapter 7, Designing a Scalable Salesforce Data Architecture

Chapter 8, Creating a Lean Solution Architecture

Chapter 9, Forging an Integrated Solution

 Chapter 10, Development Life Cycle and Deployment Planning

Chapter 11, Communicating and Socializing Your Solution

Chapter 12, Practice the Review Board – First Mock

Chapter 13, Present and Defend – First Mock

Chapter 14, Practice the Review Board – Second Mock

Chapter 15, Present and Defend – Second Mock

Appendix, Tips and Tricks, and the Way Forward

 

What I Liked:

I found this book to be worth the time invested to read it – as it served to deepen my understanding of several areas of concern for the architecture design of Salesforce solutions.

1. The numerous architecture artifact examples.
2. The robust and non-trivial scale of the problems defined by the scenarios (starting with Chapter-5…)
3.  Chapter-2’s discussion of BASE vs. ACID:
1. BASE (Basically Available, Soft State, Eventual consistency)
2. ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability)
4. Chapter-5’s detailed discussion of the requirements and architecture considerations for the Packt United Builder (PUB) global property developer scenario.
5.  Chapter-6’s detailed discussion from a Security Architect’s perspective – with the detailed requirements and security architecture considerations for the Packt Innovative Retailers (PIR) global digital retailer scenario.
6. Chapter-7’s discussion of data architecture – and performance implications of LDVs on the solution design – and mitigation strategies – as part of the discussion of the data architecture considerations for the Packt Online Wizz (POZ) online shopping portal scenario.
7. The seasoned voice of experience – in guiding the reader through trade-off analysis in considering, evaluating, and selecting solution options for the various areas of concern.
8. Chapter-8’s use of the Packt Visiting Angels (PVA) scenario is a fine example of the writing expressing a strongly grounded mentoring-approach – that stresses the importance of understanding the business and technical requirements – and of documenting the architecture design and decisions.
9. Chapter-10’s discussion of Center of Excellence (COE) and Design Authority
10. Chapter-12’s 1^st full mock – Packt Pioneer Auto (PPA) global car rental company scenario.
11. Chapter-14’s 2^nd full mock - Packt Lightning Utilities (PLU) European utility company scenario.
12. Appendix lists of links to: suggested training and study groups; stories & lessons learned; blogs and training providers
13. Regardless of whether you ever intend to take  the CTA exam – this book provides a broad coverage of architecture considerations – across a number of interesting scenarios – that will help the reader expand and elevate their knowledge of Salesforce solution architecture design.
    

 

Suggestions for Next Edition

1. At 602 pages, I think the length could possibly be trimmed by ~15% - with a sharp editor’s eye toward tightening-up some of the writing.
   
2. There is some repetitious phrasing that could be eliminated (or varied a bit).
   
3. At the end of each chapter, the value of the book could be substantially strengthened by including citations to the Salesforce relevant documentation, articles, blog posts, conference proceedings, release notes, YouTube channel talks, etc. – to provide the reader with links to additional resources to develop a deeper understanding.
4. Chapter-2 should include a link to:
1.  https://www.salesforce.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/reports/wp-platform-encryption-architecture.pdf
5. Suggest making Integration a stand-alone chapter. Perhaps combining Encryption and Cryptography into a Security Architecture chapter?
   
6. Add a discussion in Chapter-10 to cover Salesforce capabilities for API Observability, Monitoring, Alerting
7. The pixel-fidelity of some of the diagrams needs to be substantially improved – see Figure 4.2 and 14.10 for just two examples. Zooming in – and the fidelity of the diagram becomes blurry. 

 

2021-07-31 Update:

 You may also be interested in my review of a new Packt book published this week - that is a fine supplement to the book reviewed above:  Salesforce Data Architecture and Management