DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
This Office Action is in response to amendment filed on 01/16/2026.
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant's submission filed on 01/16/2026 has been entered.
Response to Amendment
By this amendment, claims 1, 8, and 15 are amended. Therefore, claims 1-20 are pending. Any objections and rejections not repeated below is withdrawn due to Applicant's amendment.
Response to Arguments
Applicant's arguments filed 01/16/2026 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive. Applicant argues in substance:
Double Patenting Rejection
Claims 4-7, 11-14 and 18-20 stand rejected under the judicially created doctrine of obviousness-type double patenting as being unpatentable over claims 2-3 of U.S. Patent No. 11,474,851.
Applicant is including with this reply a timely filed terminal disclaimer in compliance with 37 C.F.R. § 1.321 (c). The filing of the terminal disclaimer is not an acknowledgement of the propriety of the rejection. U.S. Patent No. 11,474,851 and the current Application are commonly owned. Accordingly, withdrawal of this rejection is respectfully requested.
With regard to point (a), Examiner agrees with Applicant and the double patenting claim rejection is withdrawn due to Applicant filing terminal disclaimers citing US 11474851 B2.
As to Claim 1, for example, the Office Action alleges that Bendre discloses at paragraphs 118 and 120 of Bendre "obtaining, by a configuration cache manager locally from a configuration cache or directly from a database, configuration details for an instance of an application newly spawned in a container orchestration cloud computing environment". In actuality, Bendre discloses that a computational instance 322 (which is on a remote network management platform 320) receives configuration information from a proxy server 312 (which is on a managed network 300 that is remote from platform 320), where the configuration information is for devices 302, 304, 306, 308 in managed network 300, rather than a instance of an application newly spawned on platform 320 (see Figs. 3, 5A and pars. 117-120). Thus, Bendre fails to disclose that a configuration cache manager obtains configuration details for the newly spawned application instance locally from a configuration cache or directly from a database.
The Office Action further alleges that Bendre discloses, at paragraph 118, "the configuration details comprising a first configuration version number, the instance of the application comprising instance data, the instance data comprising a second configuration version number". Bendre, however, actually teaches that the configuration details include a version of an application previously installed - not newly spawned - on a managed network which is remote from computational instance 322 - not local to the cache manager, newly spawned application and configuration cache or database (see Figs. 3, 5A and pars. 117-120).
With regard to point (b), Examiner disagrees with Applicant that Bendre does not teach configuration data from a newly spawned application. Bendre discloses [0117] “During each phase of discovery, various modules of computational instance 322 may process the responses to the probes sent from proxy servers 312. Such processing may assist in identifying various characteristics of the devices, applications, services, and relationships represented by the responses. After processing the responses, the modules may update configuration items stored in the CMDB 500 such that these configuration items more accurately represent a device, application, service, or relationship that is present in the managed network…”. In other words, each time a configuration item (new instance) is spawned, it will be discovered and updated into a database (CMDB 500). Argument has not been found to be persuasive.
Each of the claims rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 includes the limitations discussed above with respect to 35 U.S.C. § 102, and the rejections under§ 103 rely upon Bendre as teaching the limitations of the independent claims. As explained above, however, Bendre fails to disclose several of these limitations. The Office Action does not allege that Cahill discloses these limitations, and Applicant respectfully submits that, in fact, Cahill does not disclose these limitations. Because Cahill fails to remedy the shortcomings of Bendre, the combination of Bendre and Cahill fails to disclose one or more limitations of each of the claims rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 and, therefore, fails to establish the obviousness of the claims in accordance with MPEP 2143.03. Accordingly, withdrawal of this rejection is respectfully requested.
With regard to point (c), Examiner disagrees with Applicant for the same reasons as point (b) above. Therefore, the claims are still rejected for the reasons in this Office Action’s 102 and 103 rejections below. Argument has not been found to be persuasive.
Claim Objections
Claims 8-20 are objected to because of the following informalities:
In Claims 8 and 15, “obtaining, locally from a configuration cache that resides with the configuration cache manager” should read “obtaining, locally from a configuration cache that resides with a configuration cache manager”.
In Claim 14, “wherein the configuration cache is managed by a configuration cache manager” should read “wherein the configuration cache is managed by the configuration cache manager”.
Any claim not specifically mentioned above, is objected due to its dependency on an objected claim.
Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
(a)(2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 1, 3-4, 7-8, 10-11, 14-15, and 17-18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) and 102(a)(2) as being anticipated by Bendre et al. Pub. No. US 2019/0342162 Al (hereafter Bendre).
Regarding claim 1, Bendre anticipates the invention as claimed, including: A method implemented in a container orchestration cloud computing environment, the method comprising: in response to spawning an instance of an application ([0117] “During each phase of discovery, various modules of computational instance 322 may process the responses to the probes sent from proxy servers 312. Such processing may assist in identifying various characteristics of the devices, applications, services, and relationships represented by the responses. After processing the responses, the modules may update configuration items stored in the CMDB 500 such that these configuration items more accurately represent a device, application, service, or relationship that is present in the managed network…”): obtaining, by a configuration cache manager locally from a configuration cache that resides with the configuration cache manager within the container orchestration cloud computing environment or directly from a database, configuration details for the instance of the application ([0118] “…As another example, a software application installed on a computing device may be represented by attributes that include a name, publisher, edition, version, operating system, and/or a product description of the software application.”, [0120] “Considering a particular software application that is installed on a client device of managed network 300, for example, canonical normalization information may include information that corresponds to attributes of that software application. To that end, identifying information stored in the database for software application "A" may specify that publisher "X" is the publisher for software application A…”, Note: Software application A is the instance of the application, and any attribute for software application A can be identified as well (not only publisher)), the configuration details comprising a first configuration version number ([0118] “…As another example, a software application installed on a computing device may be represented by attributes that include … version … of the software application.”), the instance of the application comprising instance data, the instance data comprising a second configuration version number ([0118] “…As another example, a software application installed on a computing device may be represented by attributes that include a name, publisher, edition, version, operating system, and/or a product description of the software application.”, [0120] “Considering a particular software application that is installed on a client device of managed network 300, for example, canonical normalization information may include information that corresponds to attributes of that software application … But canonical normalization information stored in the content library may specify that publisher "Y" is the publisher for the software application A…”, Note: Software application A is the instance of the application, canonical normalization information is the instance data, and canonical normalization information comprises any attribute for software application A (not only publisher)); comparing, by the configuration cache manager, the first configuration version number from the configuration details with the second configuration version number from the instance data of the instance of the application ([0118] “…As another example, a software application installed on a computing device may be represented by attributes that include a name, publisher, edition, version, operating system, and/or a product description of the software application.”, [0120] “Considering a particular software application that is installed on a client device of managed network 300, for example, canonical normalization information may include information that corresponds to attributes of that software application. To that end, identifying information stored in the database for software application "A" may specify that publisher "X" is the publisher for software application A. But canonical normalization information stored in the content library may specify that publisher "Y" is the publisher for the software application A. As a result, based on this canonical normalization information, the system may update the identifying information stored in the database to instead specify that publisher Y is the publisher for software application A.”, Note: Software application A is the instance of the application, canonical normalization information is the instance data, and the comparison of attributes for software application A can be performed with version (instead of publisher)); and responsive to the first configuration version number from the configuration details not matching the second configuration version number from the instance data of the instance of the application, updating the configuration details stored in the configuration cache, the database, or both with the second configuration version number from the instance data of the instance of the application ([0120] “…As a result, based on this canonical normalization information, the system may update the identifying information stored in the database to instead specify that publisher Y is the publisher for software application A.”, Note: Software application A is the instance of the application, canonical normalization information is the instance data, and the comparison/updating of attributes for software application A can be performed with version (instead of publisher)).
Regarding claim 3, Bendre anticipates: The method according to claim 1, further comprising: inquiring the database for a status of the instance periodically ([0092] “…discovery may be manually triggered or automatically triggered based on triggering events (e.g., discovery may automatically begin once per day at a particular time).”, [0117] “During each phase of discovery, various modules of computational instance 322 may process the responses to the probes sent from proxy servers 312. Such processing may assist in identifying various characteristics of the devices, applications, services, and relationships represented by the responses. After processing the responses, the modules may update configuration items stored in the CMDB 500 such that these configuration items more accurately represent a device, application, service, or relationship that is present in the managed network…”, Note: CMDB 500 is the database, and a configuration item is the instance); and updating the database in response to the instance being killed ([0118] “As an example of this processing, computational instance 322 may compare information received from proxy servers 312 to data stored in a normalization database to determine whether a configuration item is correctly identified…”, [0117] “…the modules may update configuration items stored in the CMDB 500 such that these configuration items more accurately represent a device, application, service, or relationship that is present in the managed network…”, Note: The normalization database is CMDB 500, and any configuration item (instance) that is not discovered (killed) will be removed).
Regarding claim 4, Bendre anticipates: The method according to claim 1, wherein the database stores configurations of instances of the application ([0117] “…the modules may update configuration items stored in the CMDB 500 such that these configuration items more accurately represent a device, application, service, or relationship that is present in the managed network…”, Note: CMDB 500 is the database, and configuration items are the instances of applications).
Regarding claim 7, Bendre anticipates: The method according to claim 1, wherein the configuration cache is managed by the configuration cache manager ([0117] “During each phase of discovery, various modules of computational instance 322 may process the responses to the probes sent from proxy servers 312. Such processing may assist in identifying various characteristics of the devices, applications, services, and relationships represented by the responses. After processing the responses, the modules may update configuration items stored in the CMDB 500 such that these configuration items more accurately represent a device, application, service, or relationship that is present in the managed network…”, Note: CMDB 500 is the database (configuration cache), and the group of modules that comprise computational instance 322 is the configuration cache manager).
Regarding claim 8, Bendre further anticipates: A system implemented in a container orchestration cloud computing environment, comprising: a processor; a non-transitory computer-readable medium; and instructions stored on the non-transitory computer-readable medium and translatable by the processor for ([0048] “Memory 104 may store program instructions and/or data on which program instructions may operate. By way of example, memory 104 may store these program instructions on a non-transitory, computer-readable medium, such that the instructions are executable by processor 102 to carry out any of the methods, processes, or operations disclosed in this specification or the accompanying drawings.”). The other limitations are substantially the same as those of claim 1. Accordingly, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Regarding claim 10, it is a machine claim whose limitations are substantially the same as those of claim 3. Accordingly, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Regarding claim 11, it is a machine claim whose limitations are substantially the same as those of claim 4. Accordingly, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Regarding claim 14, it is a machine claim whose limitations are substantially the same as those of claim 7. Accordingly, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Regarding claim 15, Bendre further anticipates: A computer program product comprising a non-transitory computer-readable medium storing instructions translatable by a processor for, in a container orchestration cloud computing environment ([0048] “Memory 104 may store program instructions and/or data on which program instructions may operate. By way of example, memory 104 may store these program instructions on a non-transitory, computer-readable medium, such that the instructions are executable by processor 102 to carry out any of the methods, processes, or operations disclosed in this specification or the accompanying drawings.”). The other limitations are substantially the same as those of claim 1. Accordingly, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Regarding claim 17, it is an article of manufacture claim whose limitations are substantially the same as those of claim 3. Accordingly, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Regarding claim 18, it is an article of manufacture claim whose limitations are substantially the same as those of claim 4. Accordingly, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 2, 5-6, 9, 12-13, 16, and 19-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Bendre et al. Pub. No. US 2019/0342162 Al (hereafter Bendre) as applied to claims 1, 3-4, 7-8, 10-11, 14-15, and 17-18 above, in view of Cahill et al. Pub. No. US 2012/0102487 Al (hereafter Cahill).
Regarding claim 2, Bendre teaches the method according to claim 1.
Bendre fails to teach tracking a number of user requests for the application
in the container orchestration cloud computing environment; and dynamically spawning the instance of the application to accommodate the number of user requests.
However, in analogous art Cahill teaches tracking a number of user requests
for the application in the container orchestration cloud computing environment ([0025] “Farms can contain heterogeneous sets of virtual machines. Cloud manager 105 maintains a "farm goal" within data store 140 which is a target number of machines of each role for each farm … For example, content farms are the basic SharePoint farm that handles incoming customer requests … Cloud manager 105 automatically deploys and/or decommissions virtual machines in the networks to help in meeting the defined target. These farms goals may be automatically and/or manually configured. For example, the farm goals may change to respond to changes in activity and capacity
needs…”, Note: A number of customer requests (user requests) must be tracked in order to respond to changes in activity needs (and thus changes to farm goals/target number of virtual machines)); and dynamically spawning the instance of the application to accommodate the number of user requests ([0025] “Farms can contain heterogeneous sets of virtual machines. Cloud manager 105 maintains a "farm goal" within data store 140 which is a target number of machines of each role for each farm … For example, content farms are the basic SharePoint farm that handles incoming customer requests … Cloud manager 105 automatically deploys and/or decommissions virtual machines in the networks to help in meeting the defined target. These farms goals may be automatically and/or manually configured. For example, the farm goals may change to respond to changes in activity and capacity needs…”, Note: Virtual machines are the instances deployed to handle customer requests).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art prior to the
effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Bendre to incorporate the
teachings of Cahill to respond to changes in activity and capacity needs of requests (Cahill [0025] “…Cloud manager 105 automatically deploys and/or decommissions virtual machines in the networks to help in meeting the defined target. These farms goals may be automatically and/or manually configured. For example, the farm goals may change to respond to changes in activity and capacity needs…”).
Regarding claim 5, Bendre teaches the method according to claim 4.
Bendre fails to teach wherein the configurations are managed using
hostnames.
However, in analogous art Cahill teaches wherein the configurations are
managed using hostnames ([0039] “…For example, the tenant database 235 include a single row for each tenant. A given tenant may include a Required Version record … The tenant records may include other items such as authorized number of users, quotas (e.g. allowed total data usage, per user data usage, etc.), time restrictions, and the like…”, [0036] “…For example, the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) table has a constraint placed on the "name" to assist in preventing a tenant from accidentally trying to claim the same FQDN as is already allocated to a different tenant.”, Note: FQDN includes the hostname, and a tenant is a configuration).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art prior to the
effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Bendre to incorporate the
teachings of Cahill to constrain tenants to unique FQDNs (Cahill [0036] “…For example, the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) table has a constraint placed on the "name" to assist in preventing a tenant from accidentally trying to claim the same FQDN as is already allocated to a different tenant.”).
Regarding claim 6, Bendre and Cahill teach the method according to claim 5, and Cahill further teaches wherein each of the hostnames is a fully-qualified domain name ([0039] “…For example, the tenant database 235 include a single row for each tenant. A given tenant may include a Required Version record … The tenant records may include other items such as authorized number of users, quotas (e.g. allowed total data usage, per user data usage, etc.), time restrictions, and the like…”, [0036] “…For example, the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) table has a constraint placed on the "name" to assist in preventing a tenant from accidentally trying to claim the same FQDN as is already allocated to a different tenant.”, Note: FQDN includes the hostname, and a tenant is a configuration).
Regarding claim 9, it is a machine claim whose limitations are substantially the same as those of claim 2. Accordingly, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Regarding claim 12, it is a machine claim whose limitations are substantially the same as those of claim 5. Accordingly, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Regarding claim 13, it is a machine claim whose limitations are substantially the same as those of claim 6. Accordingly, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Regarding claim 16, it is an article of manufacture claim whose limitations are substantially the same as those of claim 2. Accordingly, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Regarding claim 19, it is an article of manufacture claim whose limitations are substantially the same as those of claim 5. Accordingly, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Regarding claim 20, it is an article of manufacture claim whose limitations are substantially the same as those of claim 6. Accordingly, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. In particular, US 20220140996 A1 is cited because it discloses a domain name database storing fully qualified domain names. In addition, US 20200364143 A1 discloses updating a local cache of a container with a requested configuration version.
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/J.C.T./Examiner, Art Unit 2196
/APRIL Y BLAIR/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2196
