In this chapter, you saw how integrations are the lifeblood of the internet and are key to a business making the most out of the efficiencies offered by combining services from multiple vendors into a single process or experience for its employees and customers.

You learned that managing integrations can become complex and costly; however, this is something Salesforce has made easier by providing features that not only reduce the coding involved through External Services, but also improves security by taking this responsibility away from the developer and consolidating it as a set of features such as Connected Apps (inbound) and Auth Providers (outbound).

You also learned that administrators can audit and monitor external solutions, accessing precious data as well as controlling the flow of data potentially leaving the org through such features. Keep in mind that, depending on the integration needs, user identity can flow between integrations as needed using Named Credentials configured with Per User authentication.

On an additional note, Salesforce also owns the popular Mulesoft integration platform, which is worthy of further consideration, as it provides additional features that help compose brand new APIs from smaller APIs and create orchestrations between APIs that form long-running processes.

In the next chapter, you will see how you and your customers can use the capabilities of Salesforce Einstein to add AI and machine learning features to your application.