Developer shares hard-won lessons building an EKS pipeline with Terraform and GitLab CI/CD

A developer documented the real-world challenges of building an end-to-end AWS EKS deployment pipeline using Terraform for infrastructure provisioning, Ansible for configuration, and GitLab CI/CD for automation. The project hit four major blockers: AWS Free Tier compute limits forcing explicit node group sizing, private API endpoint access cutting off CI/CD runners, and IAM authentication conflicts between the legacy aws-auth ConfigMap and AWS's newer Access Entry API. Pod scheduling failures also emerged not from insufficient CPU or RAM, but from ENI and IP limits on small instance types like t3.micro, which cap the number of pods per node. The write-up, shared on DEV Community alongside a public GitLab repository, is framed as a troubleshooting account rather than a standard tutorial, aimed at helping others avoid the same pitfalls.