## 1 Introduction  
The rapid development of Internet technologies in the past two decades has enabled a broad spectrum of network applications with highly diverse service requirements and a wide variety of technologies for building heterogeneous network infrastructures. However, the ossification of the IP-based network architecture limits the Internet's flexibility and agility to face the challenges introduced by the diversity in both network applications and infrastructures [1]. Network virtualization has been proposed as a key attribute of future networks for overcoming the limitation of the IP-based network architecture. The key idea of network virtualization is to decouple the network functions for service-provisioning from the network/compute capabilities for data transportation, processing, and storage, which allows alternative network architectures and protocols to coexist upon shared underlying infrastructures [2]. The Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm follows the network virtualization principle to realize network functions as software instances that can be deployed upon commodity servers and storage devices, thus enabling virtual networks (network slices) customized for multiple tenants [3]. A Software-Defined Network (SDN) is another innovative networking technology that may address the ossification of IP-based networks. The key idea of the SDN lies in decoupling between the data plane and control plane to enable a logically centralizednetwork controller with a global view of the entire network domain [4]. The SDN introduces a network operating system that provides an abstraction of data plane functionalities and resources upon which control applications may program network operations. NFV and the SDN have rapidly become active research areas in networking that attract extensive interest from both academia and industry. Significant progress has been made in technology developments for enabling these two new paradigms in various networking scenarios, including data center networks, wide-area networks, and wireless mobile networks [5; 6]. NFV and the SDN together form the foundation of future networks including the 5G and beyond networks. On the other hand, the current NFV and SDN implementations inherit some monolithic design patterns from the traditional network architecture that may constraint network and service flexibility and agility [7]. As the next step in the evolution of networking technologies toward fully exploiting the advantages of network virtualization and softwarization, cloud-native network design applies the service-oriented architectural principle together with virtualization and softwarization in networking, which enables network systems to be realized based on cloud technologies and network services to be provisioned following the cloud service model [8]. The cloud-native design principle has been embraced by all major network Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) in their latest work, for example ETSI NFV Release-4 and the 3 GPP 5G core network architecture. Therefore, cloud-native design is expected to be a key attribute of future networks [9]. Cloud-native network design facilitates a significant transformation of communication networks from an infrastructure for data transportation to a versatile service platform for various industry verticals and customer segments, which plays a crucial role in supporting both cloud computing and the emerging edge computing paradigm. The same set of key technologies--virtualization and service-oriented architecture--now are widely applied in both cloud/edge computing and networking, thus allowing these two fields to converge together [10]. Therefore, network-cloud/edge convergence with a holistic vision of end-to-end service provisioning across the networking and computing domains is expected to be a key attribute of the future cloud-native networks. Flexible and effective management is one of the most critical challenges to cloud-native future networks.