Streamline your containerized CI/CD with GitLab Runners and Amazon EKS Auto Mode

This article demonstrates how to deploy GitLab Runners on Amazon EKS Auto Mode to streamline containerized CI/CD pipelines with significant cost savings.

• EKS Auto Mode automates infrastructure provisioning, scaling, patching, and security integration
• GitLab Runners on EKS Auto Mode achieve up to 90% cost reduction versus traditional deployments
• Solution uses EC2 Spot Instances for ephemeral runners and on-demand for main runner
• Implements RBAC policies and IAM roles with IRSA for secure pod identity
• Two node pools: one on-demand for main runner, one spot for ephemeral runners
• Includes infrastructure-as-code templates and automated deployment scripts
• Provides health checks, monitoring, and automated OS patching
• Requires GitLab Runner token, AWS CLI, eksctl, kubectl, Helm, jq, openssl

This solution enables enterprises to reduce operational overhead while maintaining enterprise-grade CI/CD capabilities through automated cluster management and optimized resource utilization.