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and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114.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 04/13/2026 has been entered.
Response to Arguments
35 U.S.C 103
Regarding independent claim 1, Applicant argues that the Office fails to disclose the limitations “a multi-role application and having interfaces and services exposed in the namespace”
Examiner has carefully considered Applicant’s argument and respectfully disagrees. In response to the preceding argument examiner respectfully submits that Alluboyina teaches the above limitation. Examiner interprets from Alluboyina ([0137] multi-role applications. [0144] the bundled application may define a plurality of roles. [0145] each role 1312 may access the variables, functions, services, etc. in the namespace 1316 of another role 1312 on order to implement a complex application topology. In some instances, credentials for authorizing access to a role 1312 may be shared by accessing the namespace 1316 of that role). Given the above, the examiner maintains that Chen in view of Alluboyina discloses the above limitation.
Applicant’s other arguments filed with respect to the rejection(s) of claims 1-20 under U.S.C 103 have been fully considered and are persuasive. Therefore, the rejection has been withdrawn. However upon further consideration and in light of Applicant’s amendments, new grounds of rejection are made in view of Baillargeon (U.S Pub # 20230153162).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 6 and 15 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims. The limitations “namespace snapshot further comprises snapshots of undeployed application resources, the one or more application resources including at least one of configmaps and daemons deployed in the namespace” are not disclosed the cited references.
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 1-5, 7-14, 16-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Chen (US Pub # 20180307537) in view of Alluboyina (U.S Pub # 20210103499) and in further view of Baillargeon (U.S Pub # 20230153162).
With regards to claim 1, Chen discloses a method comprising:
identifying a plurality of storage volumes associated with the namespace, wherein each of the plurality of storage volumes is bound to at least one of the plurality of persistent volume claims ([0032] data directory may then be mounted to the upper system layer for container 162 as a mounted directory. directory may be a unified part of the upper system layer with a shared namespace with the rest of the upper system layer. After being mounted, the /data directory may be a unified part of the upper system layer with a shared namespace with the rest of the upper system layer. In an example, each directory (including mounted directories) in the upper system layer shares the same namespace);
pausing transactions executed on each of the plurality of storage volumes ([0034] container may be frozen to allow for the capture of a snapshot);
capturing a snapshot of each of the plurality of storage volumes ([0034] snapshot of container);
creating a copy of the one or more application resources ([0034] snapshot of container where applications are executed); and
capturing a namespace snapshot by capturing the snapshots of each of the plurality of storage volumes and the copy of the one or more application resources ([0032-0034] snapshot of containers which contains namespace and applications).
Chen does not disclose however Alluboyina discloses:
identifying one or more application resources associated with a plurality of applications executing on a plurality of nodes, wherein the plurality of applications is associated with a namespace, each application of the plurality of applications implementing a role of a multi-role application and having interfaces and services exposed in the namespace ([0137] Accordingly, a “role” may itself be a standalone application, such as a database, webserver, blogging application, or any other application. Examples of roles include the roles used to implement multi-role applications. [0140] provision storage and compute nodes to implement bundled applications [0145] interfaces and services exposed by a role may be included in the namespace).
It would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the date the current invention was effectively filed to have modified the system of Chen by Alluboyina to execute applications to implement roles on multiple computing nodes.
One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to make this modification in order to implement a multi-role application implementing services, storage volumes, database and webservers (Alluboyina [0002]).
Chen does not disclose however Baillargeon discloses:
identifying a plurality of persistent volume claims bound to the namespace ([0116] a number of persistent volume claims that can exist in the cluster namespace).
It would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the date the current invention was effectively filed to have modified the system of Chen and Alluboyina by Baillargeon to associate a number of PVCs with a namespace.
One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to make this modification in order to specify a namespace and current resource usage by a workload cluster (Baillargeon [0012]).
Claims 10 and 19 correspond to claim 1 and are rejected accordingly.
With regards to claim 2, Chen further discloses:
resuming the transactions executed on at least a portion of the plurality of storage volumes ([0034, 0039] after the executing snapshot is complete, persistent storage may be resumed); and
saving the namespace snapshot to a snapshot storage resource ([0046] backup and recovery features on network storage nodes).
Claims 11 and 20 correspond to claim 2 and are rejected accordingly.
With regards to claim 3, Chen further discloses:
wherein the snapshot storage resource is independent of and external to the namespace ([0046] network storage nodes).
Claim 12 corresponds to claim 3 and is rejected accordingly.
With regards to claim 4, Chen further discloses:
importing the namespace snapshot into a second namespace ([0043] image files for containers may be copied to a new VM host);
identifying a plurality of data blocks within a plurality of storage volumes ([0043] image files);
verifying there are no applications within the second namespace differing from the one or more application resources captured by the namespace snapshot ([0043] image files are copied); and
hydrating the plurality of data blocks with data from the namespace snapshot ([0043] migrate container cluster to the new VM).
Claim 13 corresponds to claim 4 and is rejected accordingly.
With regards to claim 5, Chen further discloses:
wherein each persistent volume claim is mounted to an application and exposed to application data, wherein application data comprises application metadata ([0027-0028] mounted to a VM and stores metadata associated with the image file).
Claim 14 corresponds to claim 5 and is rejected accordingly.
With regards to claim 7, Chen further discloses:
wherein the namespace snapshot does not capture any ephemeral volumes bound to the namespace ([0033-0034] directories flagged as temporary may be deleted from persistent storage 137 to reinitialize container 1).
Claim 16 corresponds to claim 7 and is rejected accordingly.
With regards to claim 8, Chen further discloses:
wherein pausing the transactions comprises quiescing each of the plurality of storage volumes, and wherein the transactions comprise input and output transactions to and from the plurality of storage volumes ([0039] freezing transactions).
Claim 17 corresponds to claim 8 and is rejected accordingly.
With regards to claim 9, Chen further discloses:
wherein the transactions on the plurality of storage volumes are paused concurrently ([0039] freezing storage).
Claim 18 corresponds to claim 9 and is rejected accordingly.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to TONY WU whose telephone number is (571)272-2033. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday (9-5).
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/TONY WU/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2166
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