Here are the top stories SDxCentral wrangled this week related to SDN, NFV, 5G, IoT, containers, cloud, and more:

Verizon Grabs Software Control From Cisco, Juniper Routers — Software control will ride on a single common compute platform based on x86 architecture.

T-Mobile to Swallow Sprint and Form 5G Powerhouse — The combined company will be worth roughly $146 billion. T-Mobile CEO John Legere will lead the new firm, and Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure will serve on the board.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger Preaches One Love, One NSX — During his Dell Technologies World keynote, Gelsinger detailed the company’s “vision for the future of networking.” That future looks like NSX.

Here are the week's strays and stragglers we roped for you:

EdgeConneX expanded is North American edge data center footprint and added more than 50 megawatts of capacity in six markets.

Google launched the beta of its Cloud Composer managed Apache Airflow service for workflow creation.

HPE and Red Hat collaborated on container optimization and production.

Deutsche Telekom began its rollout of 5G in Germany with commercial 5G antennas and a 5G data connection.

SD-WAN vendor TELoIP added software-defined networking (SDN) orchestration capabilities to its managed virtual intelligent network overlay portal.

A U.S. Tier 1 telco provider selected Silicom’s edge devices to build an SD-WAN-based small business gateway offering.

128 Technology joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner network.

Portworx released version 1.4 of its stateful container platform with a new graphical user interface and a consistent snapshot application. It’s PX-Enterprise platform also was certified for Red Hat’s OpenShift Container platform.

Red Hat released general availability of its open source Fedora operating system.

Australian telco provider Vertel selected Nuage Networks SD-WAN to offer to its customers.

IoT provider Sigfox released a network solution for on-demand connectivity.

Chase Corporation deployed CloudGenix to build a unified application fabric SD-WAN.

Kubernetes platform Kublr released advanced cluster configuration in the 1.9 version of the platform.

Anuta Networks released general availability of its cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform for assurance, telemetry, and orchestration for multi-vendor networks.

Aqua Security integrated its container runtime security with Google Cloud's security command center.

Micro Focus released a containerized microservices platform for IT operations.

Colt Technology Services added support for Google Cloud Platform on its network.

Turbonomic updated its workload automation software with new integrations of Cisco AppDynamics and AWS Reserved Instances.

Cloud-native infrastructure company StackPointCloud demonstrated its tools to deploy and use microservices and containers at KubeCon.

Streaming platform provider Confluent launched a platform to provision and manage Apache Kafta on Kubernetes.

Splunk released general availability of its monitoring platform that automatically correlates metrics and logs.

Broadband provider Consolidated Communications launched an SD-WAN offering based on VeloCloud.

Internet of Things (IoT) platform startup Minim secured $2.5 million in its seed round.

Sysdig partnered with Google Cloud to extend its security, monitoring, and forensics for Docker and Kubernetes on Google Cloud.

Software-defined block storage company Excelero received a U.S. patent for the technique of performing NVMe access directly from a chip.

Benu Networks' virtual service edge platform was endorsed by VMware.

The Storage Networking Industry Association, the Distributed Management Task Force, and the NVM Express formed an alliance to build standards for managing solid state drive storage devices.

SDN networking consultant Datavision demonstrated interoperability between ONAP and MEF 3.0.

Data center management software company Nlyte Software partnered with the IBM Watson IoT group to build an analytics and machine learning product.

Developer cloud platform DigitalOcean released its Kubernetes product for container deployment and orchestration.

Storage and management provider Iron Mountain launched a managed data protection and recovery solution.

Container application company Cloud 66 debuted an open source container delivery pipeline.

Cyber security company Indegy launched an industrial security risk assessment service.

Here are the other stories SDxCentral covered this week: 

• Carbon Black Stock Raises $125 Million in Public Debut
• Google Cloud Swallows 300 Petabytes of Twitter Storage
• Samsung Leverages Reliance Jio's LTE Success for 5G Growth
• Spectre Next-Gen Bug Hits Intel CPUs, Cisco Catches Cryptojacking Threats
• Arista Predicts 20% Growth for the Remainder of 2018, But Stock Drops
• Oracle Cloud Drives The Factory's Car Marketplace Into the Digital Age
• Radware Reports Third Consecutive Quarter of Double Digit Growth
• Google Secures 5 Partners for Its Cloud Security Command Center
• Equinix Interconnection Revenues Jump 16% in First Quarter 2018
• Cloud Provider RapidScale Offers Citrix NetScaler SD-WAN
• Rancher Labs Compares Future to Building a Car Around Kubernetes
• Sprint Shuffles Top Management Ahead of T-Mobile Acquisition
• Fhoosh Accelerator Kits Help Deploy Super-Fast Encryption Tech Even Faster
• Virtustream Makes Security Risk Management SaaS-Y With Viewtrust
• Investors Give Juniper More Time to Improve Earnings
• T-Mobile's John Legere Caters to Trump's China Fears With 5G Ambitions
• CNCF, Oracle Boost Serverless Standardization Efforts
• An Influx of Microservices Creates New Requirements of APM, Report Says
• Open Source, Operators Key to ONF's New Optical Disaggregation Plan
• Cisco's IoT, Collaboration Head Rowan Trollope Exits to Join Cloud Startup as CEO
• Dell's Jeff Clarke Debuts Super-Fast, Super-Smart Storage at Dell Technologies World
• Cisco Tucks Kubernetes Support Into CloudCenter, AppDynamics
• OPNFV's 6th Release Brings Testing Capabilities That Orange Is Already Using
• Paysafe Finds Solace in Full Mesh Connectivity From Cato SD-WAN
• Red Hat Frames CoreOS' Picture of Managing Kubernetes Native Apps
• Is vRAN a Natural Fit For a Linux Foundation Project?
• Michael Dell Says Robopocalypse Is Fake News, Future is Software Defined
• ONUG Open SD-WAN Exchange Takes a Step Closer to Vendor Interoperability
• Microsoft Beats AWS in Cloud Revenues for the First Quarter of 2018