Systems and methods described herein provide a Specialized-Operator enabled with admission control functionalities and Custom Resource Definition (CRD) plugins responsible for improving the reliability of the CNF Lifecycle Management operations for deploying containerized workloads on any heterogeneous cloud platform or in multi-cluster environments. According to one implementation, a computing device includes a sensor Network Function Virtualization (NFV)-extension and an actuator NFV-extension. The sensor NFV-extension obtains, from a Container Infrastructure Service Manager (CISM), an event signal that indicates a deficiency with a customer Containerized Network Function (CNF) deployment; detects a current state for the CNF deployment; determines an intent for the CNF deployment; identifies, based on the intent, a desired state for the CNF deployment; and selects, from a group of available actuator NFV-extensions, the actuator NFV-extension corresponding to the desired state. The actuator NFV-extension may be configured to initiate remediation of the CNF deployment to the desired state.