 advanced features in NIC, and SO on. Research should be conducted in this area to understand the improvement of NFV from hardware perspective. Locality and latency in software implementations of large-scale net- work services: Optimization can be done by exploring the locality of requests. Moreover, various distributed protocols and consistency 6 Open Source and Research Activities mechanisms can be used to support a fully distributed NFV imple- mentation. Re-architecting network functions to recognize availability of cloud technology mechanisms for scalability and reliability: Some of the network functions, for example, traditional 3GPP and telecom NFs, are not easy to scale since they are not modular. It is important to reconsider its design to fit the new cloud architecture. Evolution patterns to NFV, management of transition and hetero- geneous scenarios: Since the network is going to be evolving grad- ually, the NFV and the traditional platform will coexist and serve the requests together. Supporting heterogeneous deployment from the management perspective is important for the deployment and evolvement of NFV in the real world. Portability mechanisms and management across NFVI realizations: There could be multiple virtualization methods, multiple NFVIs, and multiple MANO systems. How to support seamless migration across different platforms is challenging. Tools for validating network services and automating their deploy- ment and management: Telecom services usually have high require- ment on performance and availability, usually requiring five nines of availability. Thus, when deploying services in software, the monitor- ing and validation is important, especially in face of failure, errors, and human mistakes. Applying compositional patterns (network function chains) for parallelism, control logic, performance, monitoring, and reliability of network services: Service function chaining can integrate multiple services together. When moving to microservices, that is, each VNF has a unit and simple functional