Service management decisions relate to processes for Service Request Management, Fault Management and Configuration Management. There are many possible management and control decisions and it is the purpose of the CLMC to provide decision makers with empirical knowledge to design and implement better policies. The FLAME architecture describes how the CLMC uses KPIs to measure performance and highlights examples of control policies such as shortest path routing to a SF and horizontal scaling of SFs in response to changes in workload. A Platform Provider and Media Service Provider will have KPI targets that are different and also not independent of each other. For example, allocating all of the resources needed for an expected peak workload of a media service when it is submitted for orchestration would guarantee a performance level . However, the outcome would typically produce low utilisation and increased costs due to peak workload only being of a fraction of the overall service operation time. The solution is to provide greater flexibility by exploiting points of variabilty within the system in relation to constraints. Constraints are imposed by policy (e.g. a limit on resource allocation) and technology limitations (e.g. VM boot time, horizontal/vertical scaling, routing).
