Ansible can be used in many ways: most people likely execute their playbooks on their local machines. Then there is Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) (formerly Ansible Tower) and its small brother AWX. Both are the standard in larger organizations to allow for a more controlled way of running Ansible playbooks and offer RBAC capabilities. These two are also really “heavy” and require a lot of resources to run. Since some time both also require a Kubernetes backend.

These facts are not attractive for homelabs or other small-scale use cases. Luckily, Semaphore exists, which is a project aiming to provide a lightweight alternative to AAP. Maybe there are also even more alternatives, yet I was not able to find any others when researching the topic until today.

• Blazing-fast CI/CD – Get your builds & deployments done in record time.
• Simple yet powerful – YAML-based config, parallel execution, and more!
• Scales with you – From solo developers to massive engineering teams.
• Built for the modern cloud – Works seamlessly with containers, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud environments.