N8narchitecture

Questions
1

Hello,

What are the core principles of the architecture underlying the N8N workflow automation platform, and how do they contribute to its scalability, flexibility, and maintainability?

2

It looks like your topic is missing some important information. Could you provide the following if applicable.

  • n8n version:
  • Database (default: SQLite):
  • n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main):
  • Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app):
  • Operating system:
3

Hi @Kawther_Bensalem, thanks for reaching out and being a part of the community. I’ve reached out to our engineering team to chime in here, as it’s a fun question and I don’t want to leave them out :smile:

1 Like
4

Hi @Kawther_Bensalem

I don’t know exactly what topic would you be interested in, but I can give you a glimpse of some information and then you can help me steer in the right direction.

n8n separates the nodes into 2 broad categories: triggers and regular nodes

Triggers themselves can be of 3 different types:

  • HTTP request related (i.e. an incoming http request may kick off an execution)
  • polling types, where n8n invokes the node code recurringly to query for data (such as making an http request with filters to find out if there’s new data to be processed)
  • all other trigger types, which include but not restricted to timer based triggering, persistent connections such as IMAP or Kafka, etc. Any sort of trigger that would require some sort of setup + reacting to some external event

As you can imagine from the above, the HTTP related triggers can be scaled horizontally by adding more web servers that are handling incoming requests. The other 2 types are a bit more complicated, as scaling those could end up in work duplication.

Once a spark happens (any of the above trigger types kicks off) an execution is started, and it can then be sent to a queue and n8n worker processes can handle. This is how you can scale n8n to handle hundreds or even thousands of executions concurrently.

Any specific information you’d like to understand better?

4 Likes
5

ok but How we can present the components of n8n in relation to the models, controllers, and views in object-oriented frameworks?

6

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.