What is an Integration Connector?

Every external service — Salesforce, Slack, Stripe, a company's internal ERP — exposes its own API with its own authentication scheme, data format, rate limits, and pagination style. A connector is the adapter that absorbs all of that idiosyncrasy: it handles the specific auth flow, translates the external data shape into a normalized internal model, and exposes a consistent set of operations (read, write, list, search) that the rest of the platform can call generically. This is what allows a platform to add support for a new external tool without rewriting its core logic — the orchestration layer just calls “list records” or “send message” against whichever connector is active, and the connector handles translating that into whatever the underlying API actually requires. Connectors are also the natural place to put resilience concerns — retry logic, rate-limit backoff, credential refresh — since those concerns are specific to each external system's behavior.