Distributed systems often have a need for leases, which provide a mechanism to lock shared resources and coordinate activity between members of a set. In Kubernetes, the lease concept is represented by Lease objects in the coordination.k8s.io API Group, which are used for system-critical capabilities such as node heartbeats and component-level leader election. Node heartbeats Kubernetes uses the Lease API to communicate kubelet node heartbeats to the Kubernetes API server.
