Patent Issued for Provisioner Disaster-Recovery Framework For Platform-As-A-Service Offering (USPTO 10,805,182)

2020 OCT 27 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Information Technology Business Daily -- From Alexandria, Virginia, NewsRx journalists report that a patent by the inventors Mishra, Pritish (Bngalore, IN); Tiwary, Mayank (Rourkela, IN), filed on December 4, 2018, was published online on October 26, 2020.

The patent’s assignee for patent number 10,805,182 is SAP SE (Walldorf, Germany).

News editors obtained the following quote from the background information supplied by the inventors: “A user, such as an enterprise, may use a cloud computing offering to run applications and/or to provide services. For example, a Platform-As-A-Service offering might process purchase orders, perform human resources functions, etc. Moreover, in some cases a ‘tenant’ may be established to let multiple users of an enterprise (e.g., with different roles or privileges) access a portion of the Platform-As-A-Service offering--and a separate instance may be established for each user. In some cases, a user might accidently delete an instance (or even a whole tenant. Existing systems provide only a limited ability to recover from these types of situations (e.g., ‘disaster-recovery’). In addition, both data costs and re-configuration costs can be associated with such recovery operations (which can be a time consuming and expensive process). Even worse, if an entire tenant has been accidently deleted, recovery of the previous state might not be possible at all.

“It would therefore be desirable to provide a provisioner disaster-recovery framework for a Platform-As-A-Service offering in a fast, automatic, and accurate manner.”

As a supplement to the background information on this patent, NewsRx correspondents also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent: “According to some embodiments, methods and systems may be associated with a disaster-recovery framework or system that includes a provisioner data store containing information about existing resources and an orphaned data store containing information about deleted resources. Embodiments are disclosed to recover from any form of disaster-based deletion or loss of resource for a provisioner in a PaaS offering deployed on a cloud. Major architectural changes in the typical provisioner framework are provided along with algorithms to recover from any kind of disaster. Gap-points in existing recovery processes for a provisioner are solved with the algorithms described herein. In addition, disaster recovery for an entire tenant in a provisioner framework may be provided in accordance with some embodiments. In other words, a solution is described in which a user/customer is able to recover a previous state with zero-data loss and zero-re-configuration cost in any scenario of resource deletion.

“Some embodiments comprise: means for receiving a request, originated by a user, to create a first resource; means for generating, by a provisioner platform, a universally unique identifier U for the first resource that is not already associated with another resource in a provisioner data store containing information about existing resources; means for creating and storing, by the provisioner platform, mappings for the first resource, along with U, in the provisioner data store identifying IaaS resource information; and means for generating a response to the user indicating that the first resource has been provisioned.

“Some technical advantages of some embodiments disclosed herein are improved systems and methods to provide a provisioner disaster-recovery framework for a Platform-As-A-Service offering in a fast, automatic, and accurate manner.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“The invention claimed is:

“1. A disaster-recovery system, comprising: a provisioner data store containing information about existing resources; an orphaned data store containing information about deleted resources; and a provisioner platform, coupled to the provisioner data store and the orphaned data store, adapted to perform the following: (i) receive a request, originated by a user, to create a first resource, (ii) generate a universally unique identifier U for the first resource that is not already associated with another resource in the provisioner data store, (iii) create and store mappings for the first resource, along with U, in the provisioner data store identifying Infrastructure-as-a-Service (“IaaS”) resource information, and (iv) generate a response to the user indicating that the first resource has been provisioned.

“2. The system of claim 1, wherein the system is associated with a Platform-as-a-Service (“PaaS”) data center.

“3. The system of claim 2, wherein the first resource is associated with at least one of: an instance, and an entire tenant.

“4. The system of claim 1, wherein the provisioner platform is further adapted to perform the following: (v) receive a request, originated by the user, to delete the first resource, (vi) retrieve information about the first resource from the provisioner data store, (vii) verify that the first resource does not have any dependencies in the provisioner data store, (viii) store information about the first resource, including U, in the orphaned data store, (ix) store any first resource mappings from the provisioner data store into the orphaned data store, (x) delete information about the first resource from the provisioner data store, and (xi) generate a response to the user indicating that the first resource has been deleted.

“5. The system of claim 4, wherein the provisioner platform is further adapted to perform the following: (xii) receive a request, originated by the user, to restore the first resource, (xiii) retrieve information about the first resource, including U, from the orphaned data store without requesting additional information from the user, (xiv) create and store mappings for the first resource in the provisioner data store identifying IaaS resource information, (xv) delete information about the first resource from the orphaned data store, and (xvi) generate a response to the user indicating that the first resource has been restored.

“6. The system of claim 5, wherein the provisioner platform is further to verify that the first resource was deleted within a retention period before performing the restore.

“7. The system of claim 5, wherein the provisioner platform is further to ask the user which of a plurality of potential resources should be restored.

“8. The system of claim 1, further comprising: a platform manager to receive the request from the user and forward the request to the provisioner platform along with additional information.

“9. The system of claim 8, wherein the platform manager is associated with at least one of: a web-server client, and a service broker.

“10. The system of claim 1, wherein the provisioner platform further includes at least one of: an Application Programming Interface (“API”) server, a tenant creation module, a tenant deletion module, a tenant state and information module, a restore tenant module, a instance creation module, an instance deletion module, an instance state and information module, a backup module, and a restore module.

“11. The system of claim 1, further comprising: a resource allocator platform to receive information from the provisioner platform and, based on the received information, allocate cloud computing resources.

“12. The system of claim 11, wherein the resource allocator platform further includes at least one of: a director manager, a resource allocation module, a resource deallocation module, and a resource information module.

“13. A computer-implemented disaster-recovery method, comprising: receiving a request, originated by a user, to create a first resource; generating, by a provisioner platform, a universally unique identifier U for the first resource that is not already associated with another resource in a provisioner data store containing information about existing resources; creating and storing, by the provisioner platform, mappings for the first resource, along with U, in the provisioner data store identifying Infrastructure-as-a-Service (“IaaS”) resource information; and generating a response to the user indicating that the first resource has been provisioned.

“14. The method of claim 13, wherein the method is associated with a Platform-as-a-Service (“PaaS”) data center.

“15. The method of claim 14, wherein the first resource is associated with at least one of: an instance, and an entire tenant.

“16. The method of claim 13, further comprising: receiving a request, originated by the user, to delete the first resource; retrieving information about the first resource from the provisioner data store; verifying that the first resource does not have any dependencies in the provisioner data store; storing information about the first resource, including U, in an orphaned data store containing information about deleted resources; storing any first resource mappings from the provisioner data store into the orphaned data store; deleting information about the first resource from the provisioner data store; and generating a response to the user indicating that the first resource has been deleted.

“17. The method of claim 13, further comprising: receiving, by a platform manager, the request from the user; and forwarding the request to the provisioner platform along with additional information.

“18. A non-transitory, computer readable medium having executable instructions stored therein, the medium comprising: instructions to receive a request, originated by a user, to create a first resource; instructions to generate, by a provisioner platform, a universally unique identifier U for the first resource that is not already associated with another resource in a provisioner data store containing information about existing resources; instructions to create and store, by the provisioner platform, mappings for the first resource, along with U, in the provisioner data store identifying Infrastructure-as-a-Service resource information; and instructions to generate a response to the user indicating that the first resource has been provisioned.

“19. The medium of claim 18, wherein the medium is associated with a Platform-as-a-Service (“PaaS”) data center.

“20. The medium of claim 19, wherein the first resource is associated with at least one of: an instance, and an entire tenant.”

For additional information on this patent, see: Mishra, Pritish; Tiwary, Mayank. Provisioner Disaster-Recovery Framework For Platform-As-A-Service Offering. U.S. Patent Number 10,805,182, filed December 4, 2018, and published online on October 26, 2020. Patent URL: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=10,805,182.PN.&OS=PN/10,805,182RS=PN/10,805,182

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