IICTI Certified Solutions Architect

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate quality attribute scenarios and architectural trade-off analysis, architecture decision governance and documentation, strategic domain-driven design and service decomposition and aPI and integration architecture, plus 8 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for Solutions Architect.

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

1. 01Quality attribute scenarios and architectural trade-off analysis5% of the exam

   • Evaluate competing architecture options against prioritized quality attributes and justify trade-offs explicitly.
   • Scope: ISO/IEC 25010:2023 quality model, architecturally significant requirements, quality attribute scenarios and utility trees, ATAM and CBAM, and constraint-driven design.
2. 02Architecture decision governance and documentation6% of the exam

   • Lead architecture governance that keeps decisions traceable, reviewable and continuously verified.
   • Scope: ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2022 viewpoints, arc42 and C4 model, architecture decision records, fitness functions, review boards and TOGAF 10 ADM alignment.
3. 03Strategic domain-driven design and service decomposition5% of the exam

   • Design service and module boundaries that align with business domains and team structure.
   • Scope: Bounded contexts and context mapping, event storming, modular monolith versus microservices, Team Topologies and Conway's law, and decomposition anti-patterns.
4. 04API and integration architecture8% of the exam

   • Architect integration landscapes with contracts that evolve safely across many consumers and systems.
   • Scope: REST, gRPC and GraphQL trade-offs, OpenAPI 3.1 and AsyncAPI 3.0, API gateways and management, versioning and compatibility, idempotency, and enterprise integration patterns.
5. 05Event-driven architecture and distributed consistency9% of the exam

   • Design event-driven systems that maintain correctness and consistency under partial failure.
   • Scope: Kafka and event streaming, event sourcing and CQRS, sagas and the transactional outbox, change data capture with Debezium, delivery semantics and schema registries.
6. 06Data architecture and persistence strategy8% of the exam

   • Evaluate data storage and distribution options and design persistence strategies fit for scale and consistency needs.
   • Scope: Polyglot persistence, CAP and PACELC, replication, partitioning and sharding, consistency and isolation levels, OLTP/OLAP separation, and data mesh and data product principles.
7. 07Scalability, performance and resilience engineering15% of the exam

   • Design systems that scale predictably and degrade gracefully under load and dependency failure.
   • Scope: Caching strategies, backpressure and load shedding, circuit breakers, bulkheads, retries with jitter, capacity modeling, SLOs and error budgets, and chaos engineering.
8. 08Security and privacy by design in solution architecture13% of the exam

   • Architect solutions whose security and privacy controls are embedded in structure rather than added afterwards.
   • Scope: Threat modeling at architecture level, OAuth 2.1 and OIDC, zero trust service-to-service patterns, secrets management, OWASP ASVS 5.0, GDPR privacy by design and data residency.
9. 09Legacy modernization and migration strategy6% of the exam

   • Lead incremental modernization of legacy estates while protecting business continuity.
   • Scope: Strangler fig and anti-corruption layers, 7Rs disposition, incremental data migration, parallel runs and dark launches, and modernization risk and sequencing.
10. 10Deployment architecture, platforms and observability12% of the exam

    • Design delivery and runtime platforms that enable safe, frequent change with full observability.
    • Scope: CI/CD and progressive delivery (canary, blue-green, feature flags), platform engineering and internal developer platforms, Kubernetes trade-offs, infrastructure as code and OpenTelemetry.
11. 11AI-enabled solution architecture5% of the exam

    • Architect AI-enabled solutions that are reliable, governable and economically sustainable.
    • Scope: LLM integration patterns, retrieval-augmented generation, agents and tool use, evaluation and guardrails, latency and cost optimization, model hosting options and EU AI Act obligations.
12. 12Architecture economics and stakeholder leadership8% of the exam

    • Lead architectural direction by aligning technical decisions with business value, cost and stakeholder priorities.
    • Scope: Total cost of ownership, build/buy/partner analysis, technical debt quantification, roadmapping, vendor evaluation and communicating architecture to executives and delivery teams.

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