This article provides an insight into how Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) has evolved over an approximately five-year timespan, what the current status looks like, and most importantly, what challenges remain to make this a mainstream technology. There is a particular focus on using innovative cross-industry collaborations to address many of these challenges.

The REliable CApacity Provisioning and enhanced remediation for distributed cloud applications (RECAP) project aims to advance cloud and edge computing technology, to develop mechanisms for reliable capacity provisioning, and to make application placement, infrastructure management, and capacity provisioning autonomous, predictable and optimized. This paper presents the RECAP vision for an integrated edge-cloud architecture, discusses the scientific foundation of the project, and outlines plans for toolsets for continuous data collection, application performance modeling, application and component auto-scaling and remediation, and deployment optimization. The paper also presents four use cases from complementing fields that will be used to showcase the advancements of RECAP.

There has been significant interest in erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) in recent years. Excellent performance has been achieved in many laboratory demonstrations, but until now this potential has not yet been realized with amplifiers suitable for permanent deployment in the field. In this paper we describe the gain, saturated output power, and large signal noise performance of a self-contained fiber amplifier unit specifically designed for field deployment.