The operations support system shown in Fig. 1.48 refers to the OSS of an operator. It receives requests via the CFS portal and from UE applications for instantiation or termina- tion of applications and decides whether to grant these requests. Granted requests are for- warded to the ME orchestrator for further processing. The OSS also receives requests from UE applications for relocating applications between external clouds and the ME system. A user application is an ME application that is instantiated in the ME system in response to a request of a user via an application running in the UE. The user application life cycle man- agement proxy allows UE applications to request on-boarding, instantiation, termination of user applications, and relocation of user applications in and out of the ME system. It also allows informing the UE applications about the state of the user applications. The user application life cycle management proxy authorizes requests from UE applications in the UE and interacts with the OSS and the ME orchestrator for further processing of these requests. The user application life cycle management proxy is only accessible from within the mobile network. It is only available when supported by the ME system. The VIM is responsible for managing the virtualized resources for the ME applications. The management tasks consist of allocating and releasing virtualized computing, storage, and network resources provided by the virtualization infrastructure. The VIM also prepares the virtualization infrastructure to run software images, which can also be stored by the VIM for a faster application instantiation. Since it is possible for virtualized resources to run out of capacity or to fail in operation, it is important to closely monitor them. The VIM pro- vides support for fault and performance monitoring by collecting and reporting information on virtualized resources and providing the information to server and system-level manage- ment entities. The VIM has a reference point toward the virtualization in