Manage GitLab Runners with the agent throught the Runner Operator

Release notes

Problem to solve

As a GitLab administrator, to use GitLab CI/CD, I need to install and manage a Runner fleet.

Today, setting up GitLab Runners on Kubernetes is a multi-stage process:

1. Fulfill the prerequisites
2. Install the Runner operator
3. Grab a Runner token from the project/group/instance level
4. Store the Runner token on the cluster as a Secret
5. Deploy a Runner kind

Moreover, for development clusters (that likely run a Runner fleet anyway), the user might prefer to have the GitLab agent for Kubernetes too to manage their deployments.

Move basic gitops features to GitLab Free (#346567 - closed) and Manifest projects outside of the Agent configur... (#283885 - closed) open the possibility to simplify the above to two steps if the agent is already present on a cluster:

1. Configure the agent
2. Deploy a Runner kind

Proposal

• Ship the prerequisites in a GitLab manifest project that can be deployed with GitOps without any modifications
  • cert-manager will still require a ClusterIssuer
• Extend the agent with a module to install the Runner Operator configured from the agent configuration file
• Extend the group/project access of the agent to be able to grab Runner tokens and apply them as secrets in the cluster
• Extend the agent with a module to install Runner kinds that use a given project/group/instance token

Intended users

Feature Usage Metrics

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