When fetching cloud hosted files, we always encounter redirection for the download link, which is not downloadable by curl with default option.

To allow curl to download redirected pages/links you have to add -L option, like :

$ curl -L -o kubernetes-v1_9_0.tar.gz https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/releases/download/v1.9.0/kubernetes.tar.gz
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100   607    0   607    0     0    238      0 --:--:--  0:00:02 --:--:--   238
100 2805k  100 2805k    0     0  56805      0  0:00:50  0:00:50 --:--:--  111k