Aspects of the subject disclosure may include, for example, receiving workload requests for tenant devices providing services to user devices; partitioning node resources to facilitate network slicing in a software defined network to provide the services; determining that the workload requests exceed available resources of the node; and outsourcing a portion of a load to one or more neighboring nodes, where the outsourcing is performed in coordination with a regional orchestrator and a SDN intelligence module. Other embodiments are disclosed.