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 .
Response to Amendment
This Final Rejection is in response to the Applicant’s remarks and arguments filed on 12/02/2025. Claims 1, 9, 11, 14, and 19 have been amended and claims 2-3 and 12-13 have been cancelled. Therefore claims 1, 4-11, and 14-20 remain pending in the application and are being considered on the merits.
Response to Arguments
Applicant's arguments filed 12/02/25 have been fully considered with the following results:
Regarding the rejections under 35 U.S.C. 103, Applicant’s remarks have been fully considered and are persuasive. However, as a result of further search and consideration, the Examiner has produced a new grounds of rejection for claims 1 and 11 based on combining Krishnamurthy with the teachings of Kesarwani and Rathke. Dependent claims 4-10 and 14-20 are also rejected as a result of this new ground of rejection.
Regarding the applicant’s arguments for claims 1 and 11, the applicant argues that Krishnamurthy does not teach or disclose instantiating a plurality of containers that each include a virtual machine as well as emulating execution of the plurality of containers.
The Examiner agrees that these arguments are persuasive, however the new combination of references including Kesarwani and Rathke are now used to create a prima facie case of obviousness that teaches/suggests/discloses the currently amended claim language.
However, regarding the argument that Krishnamurthy contains “no description of a process in which the response to a request to instantiate multiple containers and therefore multiple virtual machines is to instantiate a single virtual machine,” the Examiner contends that the BRI of the current claim language includes receiving a request and instantiating a plurality of instances in a virtual machine without instantiating containers as well. The Examiner would like to draw attention to par. 0094 in which it is stated that “one or more policies can be generated to instantiate and/or govern an application entity in the policy layer 235 corresponding to an application executing on a VM 114 monitored by the context engine MP 240.” The Examiner argues that this covers the BRI of a request, such as one described in par. 0027, 0081, and 0150, leading to the policy generator, working with the management and control planes, instantiating applications, or instances, within a single virtual machine.
For further explanation, please refer to the 103 rejection section below.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
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.
Claim(s) 1-2, 4-9, 11-12, and 14-19 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Krishnamurthy et al. (US 20200334068) in view of Kesarwani (US 10268514) and Rathke (US 20170329635).
Regarding claims 1 and 11, Krishnamurthy teaches: A method / An apparatus comprising: a computing device including one or more processing devices and one or more memory devices operably coupled to the one or more processing devices, the one or more memory devices storing executable code that, when executed by the one or more processing devices, causes the one or more processing devices to (computing device/platform includes a processor structured to execute instructions stored in memory to implement systems/operations par. 0235 – 0236) in response to the request: instantiate the plurality of application images in a single virtual machine to obtain a plurality of application instances without instantiating the plurality of containers (instantiation of one or more applications executing on VMs where a DCN is implemented as VMs or containers, since applications are instantiated to execute on DCNs the containers do not need to be instantiated par. 0094 and 0116, based on requests through management/control plane par. 0027, 0081, and 0150);
Krishnamurthy does not explicitly state that emulation occurs or that the containers include virtual machines.
However, Kesarwani teaches: receive, from a source, a request to instantiate a plurality of containers that each include a virtual machine (user using API requests to instantiate container instances through container service Col. 5 Lines 7 – 27, the container service executing virtual machines configured as container instances Col. 14 Lines 20 – 50), each container having a corresponding application image of a plurality of application images (containers may be virtualized instances within the operating systems launched from application images Col. 15 Lines 41 – 53);
It would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the application to combine the teachings of Krishnamurthy with the teachings of Kesarwani since the teachings of Kesarwani would provide an enhancement through the use of a container service, which instantiates containers on behalf of a customer/user while also managing container instances/VMs in the container.
Krishnamurthy and Kesarwani do not explicitly teach emulation.
However, Rathke teaches: emulate execution of the plurality of containers with respect to the plurality of application instances in response to instructions from the source (host environment includes an emulation container par. 0041 which emulates execution of the computing resources par. 0004 – 0009).
It would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the application to combine the teachings of Krishnamurthy and Kesarwani with the teachings of Rathke since the emulation environment of Rathke further provides processor/computing resource emulation while also handling/synchronizing metadata of the emulated resources, thereby enhancing the combination through the act of emulating the containers.
Regarding claims 2 and 12, Krishnamurthy teaches: wherein the executable code, when executed by the one or more processing devices, further causes the one or more processing devices to: instantiate the plurality of application instances in a single virtual machine (instantiation of application entities running on a single VM 114 par. 0094, 0116, and 0209).
Regarding claims 4 and 14, Krishnamurthy teaches: wherein the one or more processing devices are a plurality of processing devices (implementation of one or more microprocessors par. 0235); and wherein the executable code, when executed by the one or more processing devices, further causes the plurality of processing devices to: bind each application instance of the plurality of application instances to a processing device of the plurality of processing devices (hypervisor managing the association between the resources and the virtual resources being allocated to the VMs par. 0056 and 0094).
Regarding claims 5 and 15, Krishnamurthy teaches: wherein the one or more processing devices are a plurality of processing devices (implementation of one or more microprocessors par. 0235); and wherein the executable code, when executed by the one or more processing devices, further causes the plurality of processing devices to: cooperate with a kernel executing on the plurality of processing devices to bind each application instance of the plurality of application instances to a processing device of the plurality of processing devices (context engine is a kernel component of the hypervisor on which the VMs are executing, the context engine obtaining parameters that specifies the application that has started in its VM, binding them together par. 0056, 0094, 0128, and 0138).
Regarding claims 6 and 16, Krishnamurthy teaches: wherein the executable code, when executed by the one or more processing devices, further causes the one or more processing devices to: perform collection of usage data for the plurality of application instances (application data traffic is identified and analyzed to determine whether there is a flow between applications and/or VMs, thereby collecting usage related to the application instances par. 0221).
Regarding claims 7 and 17, Krishnamurthy teaches: wherein the usage data is processor usage data (application data traffic is done through processors par. 0059).
Regarding claims 8 and 18, Krishnamurthy teaches: wherein the executable code, when executed by the one or more processing devices, further causes the one or more processing devices to collect the usage data using a daemon executing on the one or more processing devices (application data traffic is analyzed through the context input processor, which acts as the daemon, executing on a policy engine par. 0093).
Regarding claims 9 and 19, Kesarwani teaches: the request includes an identifier for each container of the plurality of containers (API call can include an identifier associated with the container/container instance Col. 7 Lines 39 – 58)
For motivation to combine see claim 1 above.
Krishnamurthy and Kesarwani does not explicitly teach emulation.
However, Rathke teaches: emulate execution of the plurality of containers with respect to the plurality of application instances in response to instructions from the source by returning the usage data to the source by maintaining a container state for the identifier of each container of the plurality of containers (compute nodes include emulation containers and virtual machines, of which metadata is maintained, distributed, and shared between compute nodes within the network regarding operating states and identifiers assigned to compute nodes which are emulating certain architectures par. 0041, 0086, 0135 – 0138)
For motivation to combine see claim 1 above.
Claim(s) 3, 10, 13, and 20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Krishnamurthy, Kesarwani, and Rathke in view of Pashenkov et al. (WO 2020231841).
Regarding claims 3 and 13, Pashenkov teaches: wherein each container of the plurality of containers includes a virtual machine (each container includes a Unikernel which is executable code that can execute natively on a VM par. 0035).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the application to combine the teachings of Krishnamurthy, Kesarwani, and Rathke with the teachings of Pashenkov since the teachings of Pashenkov provide virtual machine level isolation for individual microservice instances, thereby enhancing the containers of Krishnamurthy (Pashenkov: par. 0006).
Regarding claims 10 and 20, Pashenkov teaches: wherein the source implements KUBERNETES (container is compatible with a Kubernetes orchestration framework par. 0045).
For motivation to combine see claim 3 above.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. Bansal et al. (US 20170272400) which discloses instantiating containers through software packages which includes selecting a virtual machine as the container host.
THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
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/J.S.M./Examiner, Art Unit 2198
/PIERRE VITAL/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2198