Earlier this year I’ve started using K3s regularly for local testing of Kubernetes workloads, APIs, tools, and more. I’ve grown quite fond of k3s for multiple reasons: it’s very easy and fast to install, very easy to use, and so far I have not found a single service designed for K8s that wouldn’t work on K3s. I’ve run it both on Linux machines as well as on Windows machines through WSL2. It just works. I use it in particular also to test my own K8s controllers and operators. Installation typically finishes in 15-20 seconds, and system pods are usually running fine after another at most 30 seconds.

Over the last few days I noticed that when I use kubectl to manage a k8s test cluster in Azure, it takes forever to actually carry out the operations remotely. Today I took some time to debug this. Here’s how I debugged and ultimately fixed the slow kubectl commands on Windows.

Get Verbose Output #

I started with changing the log level, and capturing the details, like this: