The correct option is To act as the node agent that manages container lifecycles and communicates with the container runtime.

The kubelet is the primary node agent that runs on every worker node and it ensures that containers described in PodSpecs are running and healthy. It communicates with the container runtime through the Container Runtime Interface to start and stop containers, it monitors container status and resource usage, and it reports the node and Pod status back to the control plane. The kubelet also handles image pulling and respects liveness and readiness probes to maintain the desired state of workloads.

To schedule Pods onto the node is incorrect because scheduling is performed by the kube-scheduler and not by the kubelet. The scheduler decides which node should receive a Pod and the kubelet on that node then implements the PodSpec.

To route service traffic on the node using kube-proxy is incorrect because networking and service proxying are the responsibility of kube-proxy or other CNI components. The kubelet does not perform service routing or proxying.

To authenticate node metrics to Cloud Monitoring for collection is incorrect because metrics collection and exporting to cloud monitoring systems are handled by metrics agents or the metrics-server and by separate cloud integrations. The kubelet may expose metrics, but it is not responsible for authenticating and shipping them to external monitoring services.

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