From Zero to a Working EKS Pipeline: Terraform, Ansible, and GitLab CI/CD (and Everything That Broke Along the Way)

Short summary

A practical walkthrough of building an EKS deployment pipeline with Terraform, Ansible, and GitLab CI/CD, focusing on the real failures encountered. Key blockers include AWS Free Tier compute limits, EKS API endpoint access configuration, the transition from aws-auth ConfigMap to the Access Entry API, and pod density limits on small instance types. Each problem includes the fix and a transferable lesson.

• •Free Tier compute limits require hardcoding capacity expectations in Terraform
• •EKS API endpoint access must be configured explicitly for CI/CD runners
• •AWS is moving from aws-auth ConfigMap to Access Entry API — old tutorials will mislead
• •Pod scheduling failures on small instances are often ENI/IP limits, not CPU/memory

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.