Not all micro-services can be stateless lambda functions. Some services must maintain state. A good example is the management of autonomous vehicle platooning functions across multiple radio network sites.
A challenge for this distributed statefulness is if the stateful micro-services are running in a specific container then how does the SDN controller manage networking to a specific container? This requires attaching the SDN networking at the container rather than the host level. Something that is possible with Amazon EC2 Container Service
If Tier-1 telcos are serious about providing Network as a Service or Edge Compute as a Service then they must provide the join between data centre and network operator. To do this they can either be the edge landlord to Amazon, Google and Facebook. Or if they are truly ambitious they need to provide a SDN Edge
Charles Gibbons is talking about Future of NFV / SDN at Digital Transformation World this week in Nice:
API Crazy 