Deployment Strategies and Production Best Practices

Over the last few lessons, we have built an incredibly capable AI Triage Agent. It has evolved from a simple script into a modular, multi-agent system that can analyze issues, consult a knowledge base, and integrate with the team’s core tools. It’s a powerful piece of software.

As with any software project, an important question that arises at this stage is how to deploy and run this in a production environment.

In this lesson, we will analyze the different hosting options, discuss their pros and cons from a developer’s perspective, and establish a set of best practices for security, scalability, and maintainability that apply to any production-grade automation.

Choosing your hosting strategy

The first decision in any deployment is choosing the right infrastructure model. n8n offers a spectrum of options, from fully managed to fully self-controlled. We will analyze each one based on the most important criteria: control, maintenance overhead, security, and scalability.

Option 1: n8n Cloud

This is the fully managed, hosted solution provided by n8n, and it’s what we’ve used throughout this course. Think of n8n Cloud as a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) like Heroku, Netlify, or Vercel. You are responsible for your code (your workflows), but the underlying infrastructure, scaling, security patching, and maintenance are handled for you.

• Pros:

  • Zero infrastructure overhead: This is the fastest way to get to production. There are no servers to provision, no Docker to configure, or databases to manage.

  • Managed security: n8n handles SSL/TLS termination, firewalling, and platform security for you.

  • Automatic scaling and reliability: The platform is built for high availability and manages resources for your workflows.

  • Simple setup: It’s the most straightforward way to get started and quickly prove the value of automation. ...