Caching container images for kube-system

[sdc395]

Hi all

I love K3D, and I'm using it extensively for creating integration test environments. In doing so, I've noticed what seems to be a significant amount of network activity as each cluster is starting up. I'm fairly new to K8S, and so I'm not sure now to find the cause of this activity. My guess is that K3D is downloading the container images for things like CoreDNS and other pods in the kube-system namespace.

Is there a way to cache kube-system (and other) container images in my local K3D-managed registry? And if my guess is wrong, can someone tell me what K3D is up to, and if it can be avoided each time I create a cluster.

Thanks
Simon

[iwilltry42]

Hi @sdc395 , thanks for starting this discussion!
Yep, you're right that K3s (inside k3d) needs to pull some system images on cluster startup.
You can use a special registry setup to redirect pulls to your local registry though.
I'll create an issue from this discussion to write some docs about this 👍

[sdc395]

Thanks @iwilltry42 , that will be very useful info.