{
  "patent_number": "US 12217035",
  "country": "US",
  "title": "How to Safely Shut Down Microservices Without Breaking Apps",
  "original_title": "Microservice termination while maintaining high availability",
  "summary": "A method for shutting down parts of a software system one by one by mapping active requests to specific services, ensuring no tasks are interrupted during updates.",
  "what_it_does": "This patent describes a 'termination manager' that watches the work queues of a complex software application built from many small, independent programs called microservices. When an application needs to be updated or shut down, the manager looks at every active request and builds a 'call graph'—a map showing exactly which microservices that request needs to touch to finish its job. If a microservice is not on any active map, the system knows it is safe to turn off that service immediately. As requests finish and drop off the map, the manager keeps killing off the remaining services in a smart, orderly sequence until the entire old version of the application is gone without dropping a single user request.",
  "what_it_does_not_cover": [
    "Does not cover shutting down services based on time-based delays or static timers.",
    "Does not cover systems that simply kill all services at once regardless of active requests.",
    "Does not cover load balancing or routing traffic to new services.",
    "Does not cover hardware-level power management or physical server shutdown."
  ],
  "filed": "2024-03-20",
  "granted": "2025-02-04",
  "expires": null,
  "status": "active",
  "holder": "Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC",
  "holder_url": "https://patentbrief.org/company/microsoft-technology-licensing-llc",
  "inventors": [
    {
      "name": "Ali Kanso",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/ali-kanso"
    },
    {
      "name": "Karthik Maharajan Sankara SUBRAMANIAN",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/karthik-maharajan-sankara-subramanian"
    }
  ],
  "times_cited": 0,
  "tags": [
    "software",
    "telecommunications",
    "ai_ml",
    "ecommerce"
  ],
  "abstract": "The techniques disclosed herein enable systems to reduce the time required to terminate a set of microservices for an application while ensuring high availability and preventing request failures. This is accomplished through a termination manager which retrieves request queues for the microservices to analyze outstanding requests that require processing prior to termination. Based on the outstanding requests, the termination manager constructs call graphs for each request. The call graphs capture the operational flow of the associated request by defining a sequence of microservices whose functionality is invoked by the request. From an initial analysis, the termination manager can determine that some of the microservices do not appear in the call graphs, indicating that the microservices are not needed to process the outstanding requests. Accordingly, the unneeded microservices are terminated. As requests are processed by the remaining microservices, the termination manager gradually terminates the remaining microservices based on the call graphs.",
  "url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/12217035/vision-pro-spatial-photos-videos",
  "markdown_url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/12217035/vision-pro-spatial-photos-videos/md",
  "google_patents_url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US12217035",
  "relatedPatents": []
}