US Patent 10469450 Creating and distributing template based service rules

Some embodiments of the invention introduce cloud template awareness in the service policy framework. Some embodiments provide one or more service rule processing engines that natively support (1) template-specific dynamic groups and template-specific rules, and (2) dynamic security tag concepts. A service rule processing engine of some embodiments natively supports template-specific dynamic groups and rules as it can directly process service rules that are defined in terms of dynamic component groups, template identifiers, template instance identifiers, and/or template match criteria. Examples of such services can include any kind of middlebox services, such as firewalls, load balancers, network address translators, intrusion detection systems, intrusion prevention systems, etc.