APIs, Networking & Integration Topics
API design, management, and integration patterns including REST, GraphQL, and other protocols. Covers API contract design, versioning strategies, error handling, idempotency, deprecation planning, and SDK/integration frameworks. Includes system-to-system integration, webhook patterns, and integration platform considerations. Excludes network infrastructure and network-layer protocols (see Network Architecture under Cloud & Infrastructure or a dedicated networking category if needed).
Enterprise Integration and Automation
Covers end to end design, architecture, implementation, and operational management of integrating software systems across an enterprise. Candidates should be able to design integration architectures that connect products with enterprise technology stacks such as customer relationship management systems, enterprise resource planning systems, data warehouses, and cloud platforms. Key topics include common integration patterns and anti patterns such as point to point, hub and spoke, enterprise service bus, publish subscribe and event driven architecture, and batch based extract transform load pipelines; interface choices including application programming interfaces, messaging, streaming and batch data exchanges; and trade offs in latency, throughput, delivery semantics and complexity. Data topics include data flow mapping, data quality, reconciliation, master data management, schema evolution, privacy and data governance. Strategy and operational concerns include migration and cutover planning, testing and rollback strategies, monitoring and observability of data flows and dependencies, service level agreement and capacity planning, performance and scalability under load, and incident response. Engineering details include version and contract management for interfaces, dependency and compatibility management, idempotency and error handling strategies, reconciliation and eventual consistency patterns, and practical troubleshooting for driver, protocol and component incompatibilities. Automation and workflow topics cover orchestration, choreography, workflow automation to reduce manual work, vendor selection and governance, and the trade offs between customization and configuration. Candidates should be able to identify integration risks, propose architecture and operational mitigations, and reason about testing, monitoring, security, maintainability and continuous improvement for integrated systems.
API and Web Service Troubleshooting
Knowledge of how web services and application programming interfaces operate and methods to debug common failures. Candidates should understand request and response flows, status codes and error semantics in Hypertext Transfer Protocol and its secure variant, representational state transfer principles, authentication and authorization failures, rate limiting and throttling, serialization and deserialization problems, and performance factors such as timeouts and retries. The topic includes practical use of tools to exercise endpoints, inspect headers and payloads, correlate API logs and traces, and isolate whether an issue is client side, network related, or server side.
Application Programming Interface Troubleshooting and Integration
Covers troubleshooting and integration issues for application programming interfaces, including request and response structure, status code meanings, authentication and authorization methods, rate limiting and throttling, timeouts, and schema or contract mismatches. Candidates should be able to test endpoints with common tools, interpret error payloads, debug cross service integrations and third party connections, and choose when to retry versus escalate.