support billions of application-heavy, photo-sharing, video-streaming, mobile devices, and emerging IoT applications, all of which require on-demand scaling, high resil- iency, and the capability to do on-the-fly service modifications. Network connectivity is at the core of every innovation these days, from cars to phones to video and more. Connectivity and network usage are exploding-data traffic on AT&T's mobile network alone grew by nearly 150,000% between 2007 and 2014. This trend will continue, with some esti- mates showing wireless data traffic growing by a factor of 10 by 2020. Video comprises about 60% of AT&T's total network traffic-roughly 114 petabytes per day as of this writing. To put that into perspective, 114 petabytes equals about 130 million hours of HD video. As it stands right now, send- ing a minute of video takes about 4 megabytes of data. In comparison, sending a minute of virtual reality (VR) video takes hundreds of megabytes. With VR becoming increasingly popular, having an easy and convenient way to access this data-hungry content is essential. At the same time, IoT is also generating mountains of data that have to be stored and analyzed. By 2020, there will be an estimated 20-50 billion connected devices. Public networks and especially those that cover large areas have always been expensive to deploy. To enable the growth and the use of networks (the value of a network increases as more users get on it), operators have relied on technology advances to continue to improve performance and drive costs down. Compared to a public network in the twentieth century, today's all-IP network with advanced services radically changes many of the requirements. The number of different services or applications available at any one time has grown by several orders of magnitude and services are The Need for Change constantly evolving, driven by mobile device capabilities, social media, and value created by avail- able content and applications. To keep pace with these new applications, and to be able to pr