The described “elastic 5G” service provides and manages all of the hardware, software, and network functions, required to build a network. In some embodiments, the network functions may be developed and managed by the cloud service provider; however, the described control plane can manage network functions across a range of providers, so that customers can use a single set of APIs to call and manage their choice of network functions on cloud infrastructure. The elastic 5G service beneficially automates the creation of an end-to-end 5G network, from hardware to network functions thus reducing the time to deploy and the operational cost of operating the network. By providing APIs that expose network capabilities, the disclosed elastic 5G service enables applications to simply specify the desired QoS as constraints and then deploys and chains the network functions together to deliver an end-to-end service that meets the specified requirements, thus making it possible to easily build new applications.