Spoke with Renil about splitting this story between runner registration and docker-in-docker (DinD), given DinD has more configuration options and additional security concerns

I was able to test the DinD configuration locally with docker. The MR was approved by Renil this morning after I pushed my changes. We'll need to see if the gitlab runner registers successfully before we can fully test DinD. The k8s/istio upgrade is a higher priority and these changes probably don't need to be merged until the upgrade is complete.

merged MR to fix the polling request warning and moved the external secret to the provided chart level resource. Moving to CI test to confirm the alpine runner pod kicks off an ubuntu job pod.

The ci pipeline in the test app repository can now schedule jobs on the newly provisioned runner. It's still a basic docker job, so I'll be moving into docker compose and building/pushing images first thing tomorrow.

Chris getting to closure and more tickets will follow up pending discussion