Overview
Workflow Adapters are tools that allow a workflow to interact with systems outside the CWM. You can see them as agents and intermediaries between the CWM platform and any external services. Their role is to cause an action in an outside system that's part of a workflow stream, or to retrieve data required by a workflow to progress.
Every adapter is developed for communicating with an intended target service. Target services can be generic, such as REST APIs over HTTP, or specific, such as vendor products (Cisco's Network Services Orchestrator, for example).
If a workflow needs to access one or more external services, you can develop custom adapters for each of them using the Adapter SDK. You may also want to use two pre-built adapters which are available as part of the CWM offering. These ready-made solutions include: the Network Services Orchestrator adapter and a generic REST API adapter.