Release Notes CWM 1.0

This section contains the following topics:

Intro

This document provides information about Cisco Crosswork Workflow Manager 1.0, including product overview and features, known issues and limitations, compatibility information and VM requirements.

Product overview

The Crosswork Workflow Manager architecture is a microservice-based solution that operates on top of the Kubernetes container orchestration system.

With CWM 1.0, you can build your own workflows to automate network management tasks, making them repeatable and low-risk. CWM can integrate to existing external systems and applications through the use of Adapters. You can tailor your custom adapters to fit your environment using the Adapter SDK, or use our two pre-built adapter solutions:

  • adapter for Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO), and

  • a generic Representational State Transfer (REST) adapter which can be used with any external system that supports REST APIs.

Features

This section contains the features' descriptions available in CWM 1.0.

Table 1. Features released with CWM 1.0

Feature

Description

Workflow management platform

CWM offers workflow lifecycle management, with an event history log and options to execute, re-run or cancel multiple workflow executions.

Workflow creation based on Serverless Workflow Specification and DSL

CWM leverages vendor-neutral domain-specific language (DSL) for workflow definitions based on Serverless Workflow Spec.

Graphical User Interface

CWM offers a graphical user interface for its core functionalities. Features available through CWM GUI:

  • storing and executing workflow definitions.

  • managing workflow definitions and workflow executions.

  • checking logs and history for workflow executions.

  • adding workers.

  • administrative activities: managing user access and permissions.

Easy installation using OVA file with VMware vSphere

CWM is installed as a guest virtual machine by deploying an OVA image using the vSphere vCenter.

Swagger-enabled REST APIs for northbound integration and API Postman collections

CWM API is exposed via Swagger and also available as Postman collections.

Ready-to-use adapters for NSO and REST API

CWM is shipped with two adapters allowing integrations with Cisco NSO and systems enabled for REST API.

SDK for building custom adapters

Customers can build adapters to enable integration with external systems and applications.

Fault-tolerance for workflows

Workflows are recoverable from a failure within the system.

Access management supporting LDAP and SAML SSO authentication

Admins can manage user access and permissions via GUI. CWM enables Single Authentication Agent, supporting local, LDAP and SAML users.

Health management and logs

CWM offers health management via the Kubernetes command-line tool (kubectl) and the availability to view logs with Grafana Loki.

Sample workflows

CWM contains ready-to-use sample workflows that can be run immediately, speeding up the learning curve of creating workflows consumed in Crosswork Workflow Manager.

Known issues and limitations

This section contains the description of known issues and limitations:

Table 2. Known issues and limitations

Issue/Limitation

Description

Limited feature support for Serverless Workflow

CWM 1.0 supports a subset of features offered by the Serverless Workflow specification:

Minor Accessibility Issues

There are some known issues where it is not possible to access elements on UI using keyboard (tab or label), tab sequence does not follow the fields as displayed on UI and item that has focus is not easily identifiable.

Minor memory leaks when creating workers

There is a small memory leak when creating a new worker. The issue doesn't affect system performance in vast majority of standard use cases.

Compatibility information

This section contains the compatibility information:

Table 3. Compatibility information

Hardware/Software

Supported Version

Protocol Buffers (Protobuf)

v3

Serverless Workflow Specification

v0.8

Swagger

v2.0

VMware vCenter

vSphere 7.0