Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO), as part of carrier network virtualization, refers to the structured and systematic approach to service fulfillment, including performance monitoring, assurance, data analytics, security and policy management. It spans the end-to-end service management for a particular offering in the virtualization space, from provisioning the customer order to controlling the delivery of the service, to gathering metrics and ensuring guaranteed performance levels, to remediating faults, producing usage reports all the way to providing analytics to customers.

The term LSO is also used in the 'Third Network' initiative by the Metro Ethernet Forum that aims to combine the ubiquity of the Internet with the carrier-grade performance of Carrier Ethernet.