nched in 2004.4 It was driven with the goal of providing AT&T with "competitive service differentiation" in a fast-maturing and commoditized general IP networking services world. The IRSCP design uses a software-based network controller to control a set of specially enhanced multiprotocol Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) (MP-BGP) route reflectors and dynamically distribute selective, fine-grained routing and for- warding controls to appropriate subsets of IP/MPLS routers. The essential architectural construct of IRSCP enables on-demand execution of customer-application specific routing and forwarding treatment of designated traffic flows, with potential control triggers based on any combination of the network's and the customer-application's policies, traffic and resource status, etc. This yields a wide range of value-added features for many key networking applications such as Content Distribution Network (CDN), networked-based security (Distributed Denial of Service [DDoS] mitigation), Virtual Private Cloud, etc. Apart from SDN, the other key aspect of the transformation is network function virtualization with transitioning to an architecture that is cloud-centric. AT&T started its own cloud journey in late 2010 with multiple efforts, each focused on different objectives-a VMware-based cloud for traditional IT business applications, a Compute-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering for external custom- ers, and an OpenStack-based effort for internal and external developers. These disparate clouds were subsequently merged into a common cloud platform, which evolved into the AT&T Integrated Cloud (AIC). Today, this is the cloud environment in which AT&T's business applications run. It is also the platform for the cloud-centric network function virtualization effort. By 2020, it is antici- pated that 75% of the network would be virtualized and running in the cloud. The methods and mechanisms for deploying applications on a dedicated server infrastructure are well known, but a virtualized infrastructure has properties, such as sc