OpsKern started as a homelab that kept waking me up at 2am. So I automated the 2am part.
Origin Story
OpsKern started because I kept typing the same three commands at 2am.
A homelab with a dozen services. Predictable failures — disk fills up, container crashes, backup job fails. The fix was always the same. So the fix became an Ansible playbook. Then Alertmanager started triggering the playbooks. Then I stopped waking up.
That 200-line Python bridge grew into a full operations agent — 100+ alert rules, 70+ automated remediations, vulnerability scanning, config drift detection, and a three-tier approval gate. It’s not clever. It just runs, every time, without me.
Now I’m building this for other homelab operators too.
I’m Will Smith — a sysadmin and infrastructure engineer based in Connecticut. I spend my days working in email security and my evenings building OpsKern. The book, the open-source stack, and this managed service all grew out of the same homelab that started it all.
If you want to talk infrastructure, I’m at hello@opskern.io or +1 (203) 204-3896.
How We Work
Ansible configures the servers, infrastructure-as-code from provisioning to monitoring. If a host dies, we rebuild it from the repo — not from memory, not from a wiki page someone forgot to update.
Your Hetzner account, your servers, your data. If you leave, you take it all. No lock-in, no hostage-taking, no export fees.
Flat per-server pricing. No per-incident charges. No markup on your Hetzner bill. $75 or $125 per server — that's it.
The operations agent resolves known issues in under 60 seconds — classified, dispatched, remediated, logged. Unknown issues escalate through a three-tier approval gate to a human.
The Ansible collection that powers all of this is on GitHub. Fork it, read it, run it yourself. The managed service adds the operations agent, the SLA, and a human who answers when the automation can't.
View on GitHubSelf-Healing Infrastructure — 12 chapters of real configs from a real homelab. Proxmox provisioning through to the autonomous operations agent. Every decision explained.
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