Kubernetes Lease: Lightweight Coordination Primitive for Leader Election and Node Heartbeats

Coordinating multiple actors reliably often involves leader election or periodic heartbeats. Kubernetes provides a built-in, lightweight primitive called Lease, defined in the coordination.k8s.io/v1 API group, to support exactly these patterns. You’ll commonly see Leases used under the hood by Kubernetes components—such as controllers vying for leader status and the node heartbeating mechanism in the node controller.