stacklok / stacklok/mecatl

mecak8s: bound and garbage-collect session Lease objects safely

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enhancement
Dominant language
Go
Stars
152
Forks
16
Avg merge
14h 48m
Merged PRs (30d)
536

Description

Problem

The Kubernetes Lease backend creates a distinct Lease object for every session. Release writes a tombstone instead of deleting the object so leaseTransitions remains monotonic. Consequently, session and recurring-schedule activity grows the namespace's Lease population without bound.

This creates a long-term API-server/etcd capacity and operability risk.

Evidence

  • internal/adapter/k8slease/k8slease.go:createLease creates one object per session ID.
  • Release deliberately retains the object and fencing token.
  • There is no Lease GC, cardinality bound, ownership label, or alerting surface.

Proposed direction

Design GC that preserves fencing monotonicity, potentially by durably retaining the generation outside the Kubernetes object before deletion. Add ownership metadata, cardinality metrics, alerts, and an explicit supported bound.

Acceptance criteria

  • Lease object growth is bounded under unbounded historical session creation.
  • A deleted/collected Lease can never reset or reuse a stale fencing generation.
  • GC is safe under concurrent acquire, renew, release, restart, and takeover.
  • Operators can observe current cardinality and GC failures.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start in internal/adapter/k8slease/k8slease.go, especially createLease and Release, and trace acquire, renew, restart, and takeover behavior. Review how Kubernetes Lease generations and fencing are preserved before defining the GC design. Done means bounded Lease growth, safe concurrent collection without generation reuse, and observable cardinality and GC failures.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go, kubernetes
Domain
distributed-systems, infrastructure, observability
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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