A method for specifying and executing an application including multiple microservices on 5G slices within a multi-tiered 5G infrastructure is presented. The method includes managing compute requirements and network requirements of the application simultaneously by determining end-to-end application characteristics by employing an application slice specification including an application ID component, an application name component, an application metadata component, a function dependencies component, a function instances component, and an instance connections component, specifying a function slice specification including a function network slice specification and a function compute slice specification, and employing a runtime component including a resource manager, an application slice controller, and an application slice monitor, wherein the resource manager maintains a database and manages starting, stopping, updating, and deleting application instances.