US Patent No. 11243812 - Prepared by Attorney David Tran for Salesforce and filed by Dergosits & Noah LLP
Brief description: The stateful service 301 may be configured to operate in a cloud environment using cloud-based resources such as, for example, cloud-based computing and cloud-based storage. With cloud-based computing, the stateful service 301 may be associated with one or more virtual servers (also referred to as instances). For example, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance is a virtual server configured for running applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. AWS is a product of Amazon, Inc. of Seattle, Wash. The stateful service 301 may be assigned a unique service identification (ID) 515 (described with FIG. 5A). For some embodiments, the stateful service 301 may be associated with auto-scaling group 305 configured to launch and terminate instances automatically. The auto-scaling group 305 may be configured with a scaling policy to launch or terminate the instances in the group to meet changing conditions of the stateful service 301. For example, the scaling policy may indicate a minimum number of instances “x” (e.g., x=1), a maximum number of instances “y” (e.g., y=4), and a desired number of instances “z” (e.g., z=2). As shown in FIG. 3, the auto-scaling group 305 may include a maximum of four instances 310-325. The instances 310 and 315 may be active while the instances 320 and 325 (shown in dashed lines) may have been terminated. Each instance in the auto-scaling group (ASG) may be associated with an instance ID and an availability zone. Availability zones are isolated locations within data center regions from which public cloud services originate and operate. For some embodiments, the instances in an ASG are local to an availabililty zone. There may be multiple ASGs associated with different availability zones. This may help providing some level of fault tolerance. The ASG 305 may help ensuring that a correct number of instances is available to handle the load for the application associated with the stateful service 301.