8. Lease

Let's learn about lease and its usage.

Background

In distributed systems, a lot of times clients need specified rights to certain resources. For example, a client might need exclusive rights to update the contents of a file. One way to fulfill this requirement is through distributed locking. A client first gets an exclusive (or write) lock associated with the file and then proceeds with updating the file. One problem with locking is that the lock is granted until the locking client explicitly releases it. If the client fails to release the lock due to any reason, e.g