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Introduction

The Lightweight Service Orchestrator (LSO) is a simple tool designed to run tasks remotely. These can be Ansible playbooks or custom scripts. Requests are made through a REST API, as a straightforward way to send instructions. This includes Ansible inventories, variables, and other parameters, making automation easier and more flexible.

Why LSO

LSO was built to solve a common problem: running Ansible playbooks from a remote machine without setting up a complicated system. Many tools, like AWX, are powerful but require complex setups, like Kubernetes, and are tied to specific ecosystems.

We wanted a lightweight, easy-to-use solution that works without extra layers. That’s why we created LSO.

What LSO Does

LSO is a small FastAPI server that receives requests from remote services and uses ansible-runner to execute playbooks. It can also execute Python scripts directly, without Ansible.

Ansible has to be installed on the machine running LSO, but LSO does not install it and does not pin it. LSO drives Ansible through its commands rather than importing it, so you choose the version that suits your playbooks. See Installation for details.

In short, LSO will:

  • Accept playbook name, inventory details, and extra variables as input.
  • Runs the playbook on Ansible using this information.
  • Sends the results back, including the output and execution status.

When running a Python script, it follows the same pattern: take input in the API call, run the script in the executor, and return the results of the script to the user at their specified endpoint.