ible infrastructure that is simultaneous supporting multiple services where the mix may change over short periods of time. Real-time analytics across shared, dynamically changing components create opportunities to optimize across multiple services and dimensions. These dimensions can include tradeoffs such as performance of a service, cost to deliver a service, timing of an infrastructure investment, excess capacity to eliminate emergency maintenance, etc. An additional benefit is that tightly coupled to network element service, network, and component measurements are now decoupled and can be done once in a general way within the ONAP platform, reducing the cost, complexity, and time to create services. Real-time control to optimize the network relies on SDN in the most general sense that all resources must be controllable via software and information is more centralized in near real-time for making decisions. For example, this includes controlling and configuring tunnels, packet flows, load balancers, directories, optical wavelengths mapped to packet layers, etc. and extends all the way to customer services and applications that support interfaces to allow a customer to defer or forecast demands in exchange for better price or performance. To facilitate appropriate real-time optimization, the capture of network data and executing the measurements is an integral part of the Network Cloud. The infrastructure to capture, retain, and retire network data is described in Chapter 8, while the efficacy of techniques to do the required measurements is discussed in Chapter 16. 2.5.12 NETWORK OPERATIONS The transition of network operations from supporting traditional and IP networks to a Network Cloud is perhaps the largest challenge and key to realize the benefits from the transformation. The network operational challenges include growing new skills and managing through an inter- val where there is a mixture of legacy and cloud infrastructure. Significant new software engineer- ing and quality assurance skills are needed 