This article will first talk about a wrong use case with etcd lease, and then based on that case, I will dig into the design principle of etcd lease and some use scenario with etcd lease.
A wrong use case with etcd lease
There exist two roles in the following scenario, one is client and the other one is coordinator. More than one clients could exist at the same time. Each of them has an unique ID, and when a new client starts it applies a new lease from etcd and puts a key corresponding to the client ID with lease as option. The client must call KeepAlive
of its lease periodically to keep lease not timeout. Once the lease is timeout and deleted by etcd server, the client becomes illegal and should not access the etcd resource anymore. The coordinator monits the client ID key, when a new client registers, it allocates new resource/task to this client, which can be represented by a client ID relevant key value. And when it detects client ID key deleted (which means the client lease timeout), it will recycle the allocated resource of this client.
Here we use a etcd session to maintain client lease and lease keepalive, a simple work model of client is as follows