From OpenTofu to Argo CD: GitLab as your AWS control plane

A tutorial based on an AWS Summit Madrid 2025 demo explains how to use GitLab as a central platform for fully automated AWS infrastructure and application delivery. It combines infrastructure as code with OpenTofu, GitLab CI/CD pipelines, GitLab-managed state and container registry services, and GitOps deployment through Argo CD to make environments reproducible, versioned, secure, and recoverable through Git changes. The workflow provisions AWS networking and an Amazon EKS cluster, then automatically triggers separate pipelines to install Argo CD, CertManager, and Ingress NGINX through Helm-managed OpenTofu configurations before applying Argo CD manifests for a sample web application. Application source code and Kubernetes deployment manifests are kept in separate repositories; the application pipeline builds and publishes a container image, updates the deployment repository with its new image tag, and allows Argo CD to detect and synchronize the change to the cluster. Sensitive AWS and environment settings are stored as protected GitLab CI/CD variables, minimizing hardcoded configuration and direct developer access to the Kubernetes cluster.

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