@jas At the moment you need to manually connect worker nodes to controller nodes by generating and sharing tokens. Other than that it seems as a perfectly normal kubernetes installation.

Not sure what do you mean by gitlab connection to k8s cluster.

There is a partial and very bare-bone implementation of cloud init we use:
git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde/tree/11fb
Written by David Dashyan and @krevedkokun.