Patent ID: 8040916

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a request to provision a first customer interface to a service instance associated with a router arrangement, the request being received from a first customer; identifying a resource capacity for a resource associated with a service controller associated with the router arrangement, the resource capacity being associated with a first amount of the resource available to be reserved, wherein the resource includes a shared amount of the resource which is not reserved but is available for access by the first customer; determining if a sum of customer instance resource requirements for a first set of customer interfaces exceeds the resource capacity, wherein the first customer interface is not included in the first set of customer interfaces; and provisioning the first customer interface to the service instance if it is determined that the sum of the customer instance resource requirements does not exceed the resource capacity, wherein provisioning the first customer interface to the service instance includes reserving at least a portion of the first amount of the resource capacity, the portion being reserved for the first customer.