Federation Subsystem is responsible for logically grouping virtual or physical machines together to form a Service Fabric cluster. This subsystem uses the communication infrastructure provided by the Transport Subsystem to achieve this grouping. Grouping of nodes helps Service Fabric better manage the resources. The key responsibilities of this subsystem includes failure detection, leader election, and routing. The subsystem forms a ring topology over the nodes allocated for the cluster. A token-leasing mechanism along with a heartbeat check is implemented within the system to detect failures, perform leader election, and to achieve consistent routing.