that arise Network Operations and the diversity of the network elements and domain knowledge required to support these ele- ments. As proprietary hardware is eliminated and the management interfaces to the VNFs become increasingly standardized, the goal is that operations teams' engagement will be increasingly sim- plified, with corresponding OPEX improvements. Simplified outage management should also result in reduced outage durations, thereby improving customer experience. With NFV we eliminate the need for specialized hardware, instead leveraging commodity servers and storage in the cloud. Server and storage capacity is predeployed, with cloud capacity augmentations and hardware replacements performed on a periodic basis-without urgency or tech- nician dispatches. Deploying a new instance of a network function or repairing a failed VNF now becomes a software exercise. Similarly, there is no need to store spare hardware across the network for each of the different network element types deployed. With NFV and ONAP, deploying a new network function can be managed entirely remotely, using predeployed server capacity and filling out HEAT templates. And when a VNF's hardware or software fails, it can be replaced simply by rapidly spinning up and configuring a new VNF on available cloud capacity in the same or even a different physical location. This simplifies the operations tasks involved in deploying new network capacity, and responding to traffic surges, hardware or connection failures and performance deg- radations. It also promises to improve customer experience, through faster service provisioning and faster resolution of service-impacting network conditions (failures, overload conditions, and performance degradations). The ability to dynamically spin up resources also introduces new opportunities for other opera- tions functions. To further illustrate the operational impact of NFV, let us consider the example of VNF change management-and specifically the situation in which the network operators are responsibl