IICTI Certified Service Oriented Architect

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate strategic domain decomposition and service boundary design, service contract design and interoperability standards, enterprise integration architecture and patterns and event-driven architecture and asynchronous messaging, plus 8 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for Service Oriented Architect.

Who it is for: Professionals working, or preparing to work, in software development roles.

1. 01Strategic domain decomposition and service boundary design11% of the exam

   • Design service boundaries that minimise coupling and align with business capabilities and team structures.
   • Scope: DDD strategic design, bounded contexts and context mapping, EventStorming, Team Topologies and Conway's law, coupling and cohesion analysis, modular monolith versus distributed service trade-offs.
2. 02Service contract design and interoperability standards12% of the exam

   • Architect service contracts that remain interoperable and evolvable across heterogeneous platforms and teams.
   • Scope: WSDL/SOAP and WS-* where still relevant, OpenAPI and AsyncAPI, canonical data models versus context-specific models, schema registries, contract versioning and compatibility policies.
3. 03Enterprise integration architecture and patterns12% of the exam

   • Evaluate integration styles and design enterprise integration architectures appropriate to scale and coupling needs.
   • Scope: Enterprise Integration Patterns, ESB versus event mesh versus iPaaS, API-led connectivity, message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Solace), mediation, routing, transformation and anti-corruption layers.
4. 04Event-driven architecture and asynchronous messaging10% of the exam

   • Architect event-driven systems with explicit guarantees on ordering, delivery and schema evolution.
   • Scope: Event notification versus event-carried state transfer, event sourcing and CQRS, delivery semantics, ordering and partitioning, CloudEvents, schema evolution and event governance.
5. 05Distributed transactions, orchestration and process automation7% of the exam

   • Design long-running business processes that stay consistent and recoverable without distributed locking.
   • Scope: Sagas with orchestration and choreography, transactional outbox, compensation design, workflow engines (Temporal, Camunda), BPMN 2.0, data ownership and consistency boundaries.
6. 06Legacy modernisation and SOA-to-microservices migration6% of the exam

   • Lead incremental modernisation programmes that reduce risk while delivering continuous business value.
   • Scope: Strangler fig and branch-by-abstraction, ESB decomposition, mainframe and packaged-application integration, change data capture, incremental migration roadmaps and risk management.
7. 07Zero trust service security architecture7% of the exam

   • Architect service security based on strong workload identity and least-privilege, policy-driven authorisation.
   • Scope: NIST SP 800-207 and SP 800-204 series, mTLS and SPIFFE/SPIRE workload identity, OAuth2/OIDC and SAML federation, WS-Security, policy-as-code (OPA), secrets management and service-to-service authorisation.
8. 08Resilience and reliability architecture for service ecosystems6% of the exam

   • Design service ecosystems that contain failures and meet defined reliability objectives.
   • Scope: Failure mode analysis, bulkheads, circuit breakers, backpressure, cell-based and multi-region architectures, SLOs and error budgets, chaos engineering and game days.
9. 09Runtime platforms, service mesh and deployment topologies7% of the exam

   • Evaluate runtime and mesh options and design deployment topologies that balance control, cost and operability.
   • Scope: Kubernetes as service runtime, Istio and Linkerd including ambient mode, API gateways and Gateway API, hybrid and multi-cloud topologies, platform engineering and golden paths.
10. 10Observability and performance architecture7% of the exam

    • Diagnose end-to-end performance issues and design observability that explains behaviour across service boundaries.
    • Scope: OpenTelemetry tracing across synchronous and asynchronous flows, latency budgets, queueing theory and Little's law, capacity planning, performance testing of service chains.
11. 11Architecture governance and service lifecycle management7% of the exam

    • Lead lightweight, evidence-based architecture governance across a portfolio of services.
    • Scope: TOGAF 10 and ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010, architecture decision records, fitness functions, service catalogues and registries (Backstage), reuse and ownership policies, deprecation and retirement governance.
12. 12Architecture trade-off evaluation and decision leadership8% of the exam

    • Evaluate competing architecture options and lead stakeholders to justified, documented decisions.
    • Scope: ATAM and quality attribute scenarios, ISO/IEC 25010:2023 quality model, cost and FinOps considerations, risk and technical debt assessment, communicating architecture options to executives.

Question types

Single choice 100%

Delivery

Online (remote proctored), Test centre, On-site (corporate)

Retakes

Up to three attempts within any 12-month period. A 14-day waiting period applies after a first unsuccessful attempt and 30 days after a second. Each retake requires a new booking and fee. Retakes draw a different randomised form from the question bank.

Provisional cut score — psychometric validation is required before live delivery. Blueprint v1.0.

1. 1

   Register

   Create a free account and start the programme.

2. 2

   Practice

   Online practice test (coming soon).

3. 3

   Training

   Optional

   Online course or classroom — or skip it.

4. 4

   Certification

   Independent exam and certification decision.

Training is optional and does not by itself confer certification. Find a training partner