Containers & Orchestration Patents: Who Leads, Trends 2026
- 41.0% concentration. The top 5 assignees hold 8,290 of 20,202 records in scope — filing here means competing directly against an entrenched top tier, not a fragmented field.
- Filing cooled, not collapsed. From a 2022 peak of 2,758 records, filings moved 2,589 (2021) to 2,250 (2024), a 13% pullback over that complete three-year window.
- G06F and H04L dominate the claim space. 60.7% of records carry a G06F classification and 41.1% carry H04L, meaning most contested claims sit at the intersection of data processing and network transmission, not in AI-specific classes.
Filing growth compares 2021 (2,589 records) with 2024 (2,250) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 20,202 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What the container and orchestration patent record shows
The dataset covers 20,202 published records filed between 2015 and 2026 that combine software container or orchestration terms with virtualization, scheduling or deployment concepts. It captures the shift from bare virtual machines toward container-native infrastructure: isolation levels, workload scheduling, service instantiation and runtime environment management. Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the 2025-2026 figures in this dataset are still filling in and should be read as a floor, not a ceiling.
Filing activity built steadily from 2017, peaked in 2022, and has since eased to a level still well above where it started. Ownership of that activity is concentrated: a handful of infrastructure and cloud incumbents account for a plurality of all records, while receiving-office data shows the United States as the dominant venue ahead of Europe, WIPO/PCT filings, Germany, India and the United Kingdom.
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Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 20,202-record corpus: filings by year, and the IPC subclasses those filings carry.
Filing trend, 2017-2026
Filings rose from 1,074 in 2017 to a peak of 2,758 in 2022. The complete-year comparison of 2,589 (2021) against 2,250 (2024) shows a 13% decline — real, but a pullback from a peak rather than a market in retreat. 2025 and 2026 figures (down to 291 for the partial latest year) understate true filing activity because of publication lag.
IPC technology composition
G06F (electric digital data processing) appears on 60.7% of records and H04L (digital information transmission) on 41.1%, confirming that container and orchestration claims are primarily infrastructure and networking claims. G06N (AI-based computing) at 9.5% and G06V/G06T (image and video processing) in the low single digits show AI-adjacent workload orchestration is present but still a minority claim surface. Because records carry multiple classes, these shares sum to more than 100% of the 20,202 records.
Shares are the percentage of the 20,202 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Containers & Orchestration Patent Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about containers & orchestration patent landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaRepresentative and most-cited filings
US11915026B1 — Software containers with user-selectable security levels
In accordance with input received via a programmatic interface, a level of isolation at which a software container is to be executed is determined. Based on the level of isolation, a category of virtual machines of a virtualized computing service is selected for executing the software containers. The selected category differs from other categories in at least the number of devices emulated for virtual machines of the categories. The software container is run within a virtual machine of the selected category.Filed by Amazon Technologies, Inc., granted 2024-02-27 — ties container isolation level directly to virtual machine category selection.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20140309806A1 | Intelligent vehicle for assisting vehicle occupants | 753 |
| 2 | US20170034023A1 | Techniques for evaluating server system reliability, vulnerability and component compatibility using crowdsou… | 682 |
| 3 | US20020169644A1 | Method and system for implementing a management operations center in a global ecosystem of interrelated servi… | 618 |
| 4 | US20180260125A1 | Synchronously replicating datasets and other managed objects to cloud-based storage systems | 586 |
| 5 | US20170161439A1 | Records access and management | 568 |
| 6 | US20140309870A1 | Vehicle-based multimode discovery | 533 |
| 7 | US20200389469A1 | System and method for tunnel-based malware detection | 532 |
| 8 | US20170185488A1 | Application-level live synchronization across computing platforms including synchronizing co-resident applica… | 459 |
| 9 | WO1996027155A2 | Systems and methods for secure transaction management and electronic rights protection | 448 |
| 10 | US9256467B1 | System for managing and scheduling containers | 425 |
Citation counts reward older filings simply for having more time to accumulate citations — read this table as a map of influential prior art, not a ranking of current importance.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for a filing decision
Three read-outs from the concentration, trend and classification data that matter for deciding where to file next.
The top of the field is dense
With 8,290 of 20,202 records held by five assignees, new entrants filing broad container-isolation or orchestration claims will run into prior art from the same handful of companies repeatedly. Differentiated claim scope, not broad claim scope, is the workable path.
A pullback from a peak, not a collapse
The 2022 peak of 2,758 records was unusually high; the complete-year comparison of 2,589 down to 2,250 is a correction, not a downward trend. Recent-year YoY figures by individual assignee show sharp declines, but that pattern is consistent with the 18-month publication lag rather than falling filing intent.
Infrastructure claims outweigh AI-specific claims
G06F and H04L together define the core claim surface for containers and orchestration. G06N-tagged AI-workload orchestration sits at 9.5%, meaning AI-specific scheduling and resource-allocation claims remain a smaller, less-crowded slice of the corpus than general compute or network claims.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to containers & orchestration patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who holds the claim space, and where it is thinning
The assignee ranking spans 100 companies drawn from the full 20,202-record corpus. Momentum data for the leading filers shows steep year-over-year declines in the latest year across the board — a pattern consistent with publication lag rather than a sudden retreat from the field.
A single filer well ahead of the field
The leading assignee's 2,367 records sit well clear of fifth place at 1,110, meaning the gap between first and the rest of the top tier is itself a data point: this filer's claim scope has been built over years and is not easily displaced by volume alone.
A steep drop-off by tenth place
Tenth place holds 354 records versus the leader's 2,367 — roughly a sevenfold gap. This steep drop-off suggests that outside the top five to ten filers, ownership fragments quickly into smaller portfolios.
Cross-entity filing is rare and mostly internal
Only 10 co-assignee pairs appear in the corpus, and the strongest pairings link a single parent organisation with its own regional or national subsidiaries rather than independent companies collaborating. Genuine cross-company joint filing is essentially absent from this dataset.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Pure Storage, Inc. | 25 | -84% |
| NVIDIA Corp | 16 | -91% |
| Wiz Inc | 12 | -88% |
| Amazon Technologies, Inc. | 5 | -83% |
| International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) | 5 | -71% |
| Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (publ) | 4 | -50% |
| Cisco Technology, Inc. | 4 | -85% |
| Dell Products L.P. | 0 | -100% |
Where to take this analysis
The trend and classification data point to specific next steps for teams evaluating freedom to operate or new filing strategy in this space.
Map claim scope against the top assignees directly
With 41.0% of records held by five companies, a claim-by-claim comparison against their granted patents — not just their published applications — will show which isolation, scheduling and instantiation approaches are already occupied.
Explore assignee portfolios in EurekaTrack the AI-orchestration and edge branches separately
G06N and H04W classes remain minority shares of the corpus at 9.5% and 8.2% respectively. Treat these as separate landscapes with their own competitive dynamics rather than folding them into the general container-orchestration count.
Run a focused subclass search in EurekaCommon questions on container and orchestration patents
The assignee ranking in this dataset covers 100 companies drawn from 20,202 records, and the leading filer holds 2,367 of them — well ahead of fifth place at 1,110. The top five combined account for 41.0% of all records in scope. This is a concentrated field: a small group of cloud infrastructure and enterprise software companies account for a plurality of filings, with a long tail of smaller filers below tenth place.
Filings peaked in 2022 at 2,758 records and have since eased; comparing the two most recent complete years, 2021's 2,589 filings dropped to 2,250 in 2024, a 13% decline. That is a pullback from an unusually high peak rather than a collapse in interest. Figures for 2025 and 2026 look lower still, but that reflects an 18-month publication lag rather than an actual drop in filing activity.
Most records classify under G06F (electric digital data processing, 60.7% of the 20,202 records) and H04L (digital information transmission, 41.1%), reflecting that the core claim territory is compute infrastructure and networking rather than any single application area. AI-based computing (G06N) appears on 9.5% of records, and wireless networking (H04W) on 8.2%, showing these are present but secondary claim surfaces. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC classes, these percentages add up to well over 100% of the record total.
Relative to the dense G06F/H04L core, classes tied to AI-workload scheduling, video and image pipeline orchestration (G06V), and business-process container instantiation (G06Q) carry comparatively few records. That does not mean these areas are unclaimed, but claim density is lower, which typically means more room for a narrowly drafted first claim to stand without immediately colliding with an incumbent's broad grant. Any filing strategy targeting these branches should still run a freedom-to-operate check against the top assignees' broader portfolios.
US11915026B1, assigned to Amazon Technologies, Inc. and granted in February 2024, claims a method for selecting a virtual machine category based on a user-selected isolation level for a software container, where the categories differ in the number of emulated devices. It ties container security posture directly to the underlying VM category rather than treating container isolation as a container-layer-only concern. Anyone building configurable-isolation container runtimes on shared VM infrastructure should review this claim scope closely before finalizing an architecture that maps isolation levels to VM category selection in a similar way.
The dataset identifies only 10 co-assignee pairs across the full 20,202-record corpus, which is a small number relative to the overall filing volume. The strongest pairings are between a parent company and its own regional subsidiaries rather than between unrelated companies, with the top pair sharing 39 records. Genuine cross-company joint filing is rare in this field; most patents here are filed by a single corporate entity.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.