in a common way. These services can be exposed to third parties and can provide a new revenue stream for the telecom operator. Some NPaaS services that may be provided are described below: 1. Database as a service (DBaaS): Database services provide a common pool of high- performance database resources, data replication, and a distributed data cache. The data- base resources may be based on object stores or relational databases (e.g., SQL [Structured Service Platforms Query Language], NoSQL (Non SQL) key/value pair, NoSql document, etc.). The service should provide throughput and predictability for all workloads including reads, writes, inserts, and deletes. It will support a mechanism for logically presenting a single view of distributed data for large databases such as the home subscriber server (HSS) and will sup- port a distributed in-memory data cache for low latency access (e.g., 2 ms response time). It will support mechanisms for replication across all or a subset of availability regions. 2. Load balancer as a service (LBaaS): Load balancer/resource broker services support the capability of distributing requests across VMs in a VNF cluster and across multiple VNF clusters. They monitor the VNFs using standard (e.g., TCP) or application-specific (e.g., SIP OPTIONS) monitoring capabilities. They support distributing requests to local as well as cross-site VNFs using local and global load balancing. If an entire local pool of VNFs fails, the global load-balancing capability can distribute requests to a pool at another site. Session-aware (e.g., SIP, diameter, HTTP, etc.) load-balancing capabilities and client/ server persistence (stickiness) are required for some VNFs (e.g., transaction-stateful net- work elements). IP source-based load-balancing mechanisms are required for some VNFs. Distribution of requests can be using either the round-robin or least utilized algorithm. The load-balancer service maintains a view of the utilization of each VNF SO that it can dis- tribute requests to the least-utilized VNF as