Happy New Year everyone. Grateful to be building alongside you. Wishing you health, momentum, and real wins in 2026. 🥂

We often treat automation tools as simple scripts, but as workflows grow in complexity, the underlying infrastructure becomes just as critical as the logic itself. If the server is fragile, the automation is useless. The production architecture for my n8n instance on Oracle Cloud, and every design decision was made with one goal in mind: Realibility. When you are running critical workflows, you can't afford a system that requires constant babysitting. Reliability through Decoupling The most significant upgrade was moving the state management to a dedicated PostgreSQL 16 container. By decoupling the database from the application logic using Docker Compose, I’ve eliminated the common "database locked" errors that plague SQLite setups during high-concurrency bursts. This separation ensures that even if the execution layer creates a bottleneck, the data layer remains responsive and intact. Security via Isolation Exposing internal tools to the web is always a risk. Instead of opening ports on the firewall or managing complex reverse proxies, I implemented Zrok as an open-source tunneling solution. This provides a "Zero Trust" surface area, my server IP remains hidden, and I can expose only the specific webhook endpoints required for external triggers. It’s a security-first approach that removes the headache of manual SSL certificate rotation. Maintainability and Performance Running this on the Ampere (ARM) architecture with Ubuntu 22.04 gives me a modern, highly efficient foundation. The containerized Docker approach means updates are atomic and reversible. If a new version of n8n breaks a workflow, rolling back is a matter of changing one line in a config file, not rebuilding a server. Future Optimizations While this stack is solid, there is always room to optimize. My next steps include: Enhanced Observability: Implementing a Grafana/Prometheus stack to visualize workflow metrics and resource usage in real-time. Automated Backups: Setting up a cron job to push encrypted PostgreSQL dumps to an external S3 bucket for disaster recovery.