In later versions of k8s, a request to //version is invalid, whilst a request to /version responds as expected. This appears to be an upstream bug, but it can be handled gracefully enough by simply "squashing" the URL path. ie.

scheme, netloc, path, params, query, fragment = urlparse(url)
urlunparse((scheme, netloc, re.sub(r'path, /+', '/', path), params, query, fragment))

Can it be handled gracefully here?