  Although there is consensus that software defined networking and network
functions virtualization overhaul service provisioning and deployment, the
community still lacks a definite answer on how carrier-grade operations praxis
needs to evolve. This article presents what lies beyond the first evolutionary
steps in network management, identifies the challenges in service verification,
observability, and troubleshooting, and explains how to address them using our
Service Provider DevOps (SP-DevOps) framework. We compendiously cover the
entire process from design goals to tool realization and employ an elastic
version of an industry-standard use case to show how on-the-fly verification,
software-defined monitoring, and automated troubleshooting of services reduce
the cost of fault management actions. We assess SP-DevOps with respect to key
attributes of software-defined telecommunication infrastructures both
qualitatively and quantitatively, and demonstrate that SP-DevOps paves the way
toward carrier-grade operations and management in the network virtualization
era.
