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 .
Claims 1 – 18 and 20 – 21 have been examined and are pending.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 02/12/2025 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement has been considered by the examiner.
Drawings
The applicant’s submitted drawings are acceptable for examination purposes.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 9 – 16 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter of software, per se. The claim does not fall within at least one of the four categories of patent eligible subject matter because the applicant has claimed a system with a cluster manager and load balancer controller without reciting any non-transitory or hardware element in the body of the claim. Thus, the claim is directed to a software product, per se, without any recitation of a non-transitory hardware element. Appropriate correction is required to direct claims 9 – 16 towards a statutory category.
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.
The factual inquiries set forth in Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 148 USPQ 459 (1966), that are applied for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Claims 1 – 18 and 20 – 21 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over US Patent Application Publication No. 2023/0104568 to Miriyala et al. (hereinafter Miriyala), and US Patent Application Publication No. 2023/0319132 to Liu.
Regarding Claim 1, Miriyala discloses (¶9) virtualized computing infrastructure and, more specifically, to
a cloud-native SDN architecture deployed using multiple clusters, which further includes:
multi-cluster access method (Miriyala discloses (¶10) multicluster deployment for the SDN architecture), comprising: synchronizing resources between a primary cluster and sub-clusters (Miriyala discloses (¶315-319) wherein the SDN controller manager is configured to synchronize configuration data between the central cluster and the workload cluster)
sending relevant information of synchronized resources to a data plane (Miriyala discloses (¶277) workload clusters 930 and central cluster 902 uses microservices to implement the data plane for the cluster. Miriyala discloses (¶311 - ¶314) data plane is used to configure and execute the workload on clusters and for synchronization across different clusters)
Miriyala does not explicitly disclose receiving a plurality of virtual IP addresses feedback from the data plane, and configuring each resource with a virtual IP address corresponding to a cluster access request. However, in an analogous art, Liu teaches:
receiving a plurality of virtual IP addresses feedback from the data plane (Liu discloses (¶6) new virtual IPs are acquired and a mapping relationship between the new virtual IPs and the label is established in the first configuration file)
configuring each resource with a virtual IP address corresponding to a cluster access request (Liu discloses (¶7) the virtual IPs corresponding to the label in the first configuration file are bound to a plurality of pods corresponding to the service resource, so as to expose the plurality of the pods outside a kubernetes cluster by the virtual IP)
It would have been obvious as of the effective filing date to one of ordinary skill in the art to combine a multi-cluster access method, comprising: synchronizing resources between a primary cluster and sub-clusters, sending relevant information of synchronized resources to a data plane, as disclosed by Miriyala, and receiving a plurality of virtual IP addresses feedback from the data plane, and configuring each resource with a virtual IP address corresponding to a cluster access request, as taught by Liu, for the purpose of dynamically (¶1) updating state pooling for radio access network (RAN) functions in open RAN architectures to facilitate stateful re-homing.
Claim 2, Miriyala in view of Liu discloses all the elements of claim 1. Further, they disclose:
interacting, by a cluster manager in the primary cluster with a cluster manager in each sub-cluster (Miriyala discloses (¶161) virtual router agent 514 (i.e. in each sub-cluster) communicates with network controller 24 (i.e. the primary cluster manager) for the virtualization infrastructure. which generates commands to create virtual networks and configure network virtualization endpoints) obtaining the resource of each pod in each sub-cluster (Miriyala discloses (¶15) obtain configuration data for the instance of the first custom resource and configure a corresponding instance of a configuration object in a workload cluster of second one or more compute nodes, wherein the first one or more compute nodes of the central cluster and the second one or more compute nodes of the workload cluster are distinct) and synchronizing the resource of each pod in the primary cluster to each sub-cluster (Miriyala discloses (¶31) SDN controller manager, synchronizing configuration data between the central cluster and the workload cluster.)
The motivation to combine the references is similar to the reasons in Claim 1.
Claim 3, Miriyala in view of Liu discloses all the elements of claim 2. Further, they disclose:
storing the resource of each pod in a database, and storing snapshot information corresponding to the resource of each pod in a Custom Resource Definition (CRD) file (Miriyala discloses (¶117) Kubernetes provides Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to add custom resources to a cluster. CRDs allow users to create new types of custom resources (¶120) and used in the initial config prototypes. Configuration store is a backing store (¶118), a central database or distributed databases for all cluster data that include cluster state and configuration data.)
The motivation to combine the references is similar to the reasons in Claim 1.
Claim 4, Miriyala in view of Liu discloses all the elements of claim 3. Further, they disclose:
wherein configuring the virtual IP address comprises: binding the snapshot information corresponding to the resource of each pod to a virtual IP address (Liu teaches (¶29) binding the virtual IPs corresponding to the label in the first configuration file to a plurality of pods corresponding to the service resource, so as to expose the plurality of the pods outside a kubernetes cluster by the virtual IP.)
The motivation to combine the references is similar to the reasons in Claim 1.
Claim 5, Miriyala in view of Liu discloses all the elements of claim 3. Further, they disclose:
wherein one or more of querying, creating, updating, and deleting operations are performed on the CRD file based on user instructions (Miriyala discloses (¶120) CRDs allow users to create new types of resources.)
The motivation to combine the references is similar to the reasons in Claim 1.
Claim 6, Miriyala in view of Liu discloses all the elements of claim 2. Further, they disclose:
binding the virtual IP address of each pod to a corresponding domain name (Liu teaches (¶29) a binding component configured to bind the virtual IPs corresponding to the label (i.e. domain name) in the first configuration file to a plurality of pods corresponding to the service resource, so as to expose the plurality of the pods outside a kubernetes cluster by the virtual IP.)
The motivation to combine the references is similar to the reasons in Claim 1.
Claim 7, Miriyala in view of Liu discloses all the elements of claim 2. Further, they disclose:
sending load balancing rules to the data plane (Liu teaches (¶50) a load balancing policy is executed on a basis of number of the plurality of the pods, corresponding to the service resource, in the load configuration file) wherein the virtual IP addresses are generated based on the load balancing rules and relevant information of resources (Liu teaches (¶51) the IPs of the corresponding plurality of pods to are added to the load configuration file, so as to execute the load balancing policy on the basis of the number of the plurality of the pods, corresponding to the service resource, in the load configuration file.)
The motivation to combine the references is similar to the reasons in Claim 1.
Claim 8, Miriyala in view of Liu discloses all the elements of claim 2. Further, they disclose:
wherein obtaining the resource of each pod in each sub-cluster comprises: obtaining a kubeconfig file of each sub-cluster in a configmap manner (Miriyala discloses (¶315- ¶319) SDN controller manager 303 instances will collect data about control node 232 and create a map on their associated workload clusters 930 and mount it for virtual router 910 pods to use. Shared configuration data of SDN controller manager 303, control nodes 232 and virtual router 910 component is shared across clusters via a mounted ConfigMap), wherein clusterinfo crd in the kubeconfig file is configured to store configuration information of the corresponding cluster (Miriyala discloses (¶308) creating a kubeconfig file for life cycle management and the deployment as defined in the CRD for SDN controller manager installation in the multicluster mode.)
The motivation to combine the references is similar to the reasons in Claim 1.
Regarding Claim 9, Miriyala discloses (¶9) virtualized computing infrastructure and, more specifically, to
a cloud-native SDN architecture deployed using multiple clusters, which further includes:
a cluster manager configured to synchronize resources between a primary cluster and sub-clusters (Miriyala discloses (¶315) wherein the SDN controller manager (i.e. a cluster manager) is configured to synchronize configuration data between the central cluster and the workload cluster)
and a load balancer controller configured to send relevant information of synchronized resources to a data plane (Miriyala discloses (¶315) Load balancer 226 represents one or more load balancer objects that load balance configuration requests among configuration nodes 230)
Miriyala does not explicitly disclose receive a plurality of virtual IP addresses feedback from the data plane, and configure each resource with a virtual IP address corresponding to a cluster access request. However, in an analogous art, Liu teaches:
receive a plurality of virtual IP addresses feedback from the data plane (Liu teaches (¶6-¶7) the new virtual IPs are acquired, and virtual IPs corresponding to the label in the first configuration file are bound to a plurality of pods corresponding to the service resource, so as to expose the plurality of the pods outside a kubernetes cluster by the virtual IP), and configure each resource with a virtual IP address corresponding to a cluster access request (Liu teaches (¶20-¶21) in response to receiving a request for establishing the mapping relationship, the new virtual IPs are acquired, and the mapping relationship between the new virtual IPs and the label is established in the first configuration file.)
The motivation to combine the references is similar to the reasons in Claim 1.
Claim 10, do not teach or further define over the limitations in claim 2. Therefore, claim 10 is rejected for the same rationale of rejection as set forth in claim 2.
Claim 11, do not teach or further define over the limitations in claim 3. Therefore, claim 11 is rejected for the same rationale of rejection as set forth in claim 3.
Claim 12, do not teach or further define over the limitations in claim 4. Therefore, claim 12 is rejected for the same rationale of rejection as set forth in claim 4.
Claim 13, do not teach or further define over the limitations in claim 5. Therefore, claim 13 is rejected for the same rationale of rejection as set forth in claim 5.
Claim 14, do not teach or further define over the limitations in claim 6. Therefore, claim 14 is rejected for the same rationale of rejection as set forth in claim 6.
Claim 15, do not teach or further define over the limitations in claim 7. Therefore, claim 15 is rejected for the same rationale of rejection as set forth in claim 7.
Claim 16, do not teach or further define over the limitations in claim 8. Therefore, claim 16 is rejected for the same rationale of rejection as set forth in claim 8.
Claim 17, do not teach or further define over the limitations in claim 1. Therefore, claim 17 is rejected for the same rationale of rejection as set forth in claim 1.
Claim 18, do not teach or further define over the limitations in claim 1. Therefore, claim 18 is rejected for the same rationale of rejection as set forth in claim 1.
Claim 20, do not teach or further define over the limitations in claim 2. Therefore, claim 20 is rejected for the same rationale of rejection as set forth in claim 2.
Claim 21, do not teach or further define over the limitations in claim 7. Therefore, claim 21 is rejected for the same rationale of rejection as set forth in claim 7.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure:
US Patent Application Publication No. 2020/0344322 to Zhu (Resource scheduling method, apparatus, device and system)
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to HASSAN KHAN whose telephone number is (313) 446-6574 and fax number is (571) 483-7559. The examiner can normally be reached on MONDAY - THURSDAY.
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/H. A. K./
Examiner, Art Unit 2451
/Chris Parry/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2451