A method for operating, by an MEC operator, a multi-access edge computing (MEC) system in which applications are provided by MEC tenants for deployment on MEC hosts of the MEC system and in which various levels of privileges are provided by the MEC operator to the MEC tenants. The method includes assigning, by an MEC broker, privileges to the MEC tenants; initiating, by the MEC broker via interactions with one or more of an MEC Orchestrator, an MEC platform manager, and a user app LCM proxy, operations. The operations can include one or more of application package on-boarding, application instance installation on selected MEC hosts, application provisioning, through configuration of appropriate parameters, and application life-cycle management operations including one or more of bootstrapping, termination, migration, scaling. The method further includes pre-validating, using the privileges provided to the MEC tenants, operation requests issued by the MEC tenants.