One of the great enablers of the cloud computing revolution is virtualization. It allows customers to condense their workloads onto fewer, more powerful systems, and to gain great operational leverage-- meaning more automation. But more than that, it allows customers to rapidly deploy new services and applications to their users. When in the past an application may have taken weeks to months to deploy, through virtualization, that same service could be deployed in minutes to hours. As the name implies, network functions virtualization-- or NFV-- brings that speed and agility to the network. NFV encompasses a very wide range of services, from routers and switches, to load balancers, firewalls, and even security appliances, just to name a few. Network virtualization also isn't new. It's been around for many years, supplying routers and firewalls within enterprise data centers. But there's a significant difference between virtualizing a router or firewall and orchestrating the on demand creation of hundreds or even thousands of content cached nodes, network load balancers, or other services. And to dynamically deploy and chain these services together to meet needs as they evolve, this is where NFV orchestration comes into the equation. You will learn not only what NFV does, and how it works, but also how to control and set it to work without human interaction. Finally, we'll address service assurance. Traditional physical communication networks are carefully managed to meet very high uptime requirements and service level agreements. It's essential that the hardware and software that supports these virtualize networks can provide the ability to manage, monitor, and report using standard service assurance, and network management tools. In this module, you'll see how to address these concerns and more.