The road to full network automation, defined as Level 5 by TM Forum, and even the associated much-desired concept of cloud nativeness is longer than many vendors of relevant technologies pretend. They remain long term aspirations rather than near realities for most operators, eventually necessary to contain the complexities of multi-vendor 5G networks and to liberate the full benefits of Standalone (SA), such as dynamic network slicing. Both cloud nativeness and Level 5 automation have widely been touted as essential for effective orchestration and management of 5G in future, and yet these can in principle be implemented within an internal data center with no cloud connectivity at all. The new complexities come partly from changing the way operations are done,…