r object storage, and soon after, the EC2 interface for elastic computing, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was born. A developer could easily spin up servers, new storage allocations, databases, etc. with API calls. Several enhancements (RESTful APIs, active Javascript, etc.) made API use widespread-this was instrumental in launching Web 2.0. The Shift to Software This allowed for a new type of composite design of services, in an elastic manner (spin-up or down) that was not available before. In 2008, Heroku took this concept further and released the first real platform as a service (PaaS) offering, which actually ran on top of AWS. The concept of a separate processing environment within an operating system that provided pro- cess and library separation from other processes, was a UNIX command called "chroot" that was further evolved during the implementation of one of the original firewalls [12]. This concept has today evolved to what we think of as containers. With the introduction of APIs and containers, the rise of microservices was inevitable; it loops back to the UNIX philosophy-do something small and have clean interfaces. It also introduces the next level of modularity and mashup composability which was not previously available. The next step is cloud native applications-building the perfect whole from imperfect parts. Why is the cloud, containers, and microservices important in this "shift to software"? Rampant traffic growth, coupled with flat to declining revenues, forces the telecom operators to reassess how networks are designed, deployed, and operated. The shift to software drives a major cultural change in how technology is developed or sourced and integrated into the network. The cloud provides the telecom operator the opportunity to drive to full asset utilization and to compos- able solutions using resources obtained real time. Containers provide a conceptual simplification and improved resource utilization beyond what server virtualization provides and microservices represents a new applicat