The communication networks of today can greatly benefit from autonomous operation and adaptation, not only due to the implicit cost savings, but also because autonomy will enable functionalities that are infeasible today. In this paper we motivate the need and present our vision for the autonomous future of networking, the concepts and technological means to achieve it, and the architecture which emerges directly through the application of these concepts. We compare our strategy for autonomy with the efforts in academia and industry and describe the architecture which we intend to realize within the first fully virtualized telecommunication network in existence. We further argue that only a holistic architecture based on hybrid learning, functional composition and online experimental evaluation like ours will be expressive enough and capable of realizing true autonomy within computer networks.