Multi-VPS Distributed n8n Cluster on Ubuntu 24.04 with an IPIP Tunnel
A guide on DEV Community walks through architecting a decentralized n8n cluster split across two separate Ubuntu 24.04 VPS instances using the open-source community edition. The setup isolates the execution engine from the control plane via a lightweight IPIP (IP-in-IP) tunnel, proxies incoming traffic through Nginx, and manages tasks asynchronously with a PostgreSQL 16 and Redis 7 backend. The environment is split into two planes: VPS 1 (Control Plane) handles the web UI, external webhook endpoints via Nginx SSL, the PostgreSQL database, and the Redis message broker; VPS 2 (Execution Plane) is a stateless compute node dedicated purely to running automation tasks. This approach avoids complex orchestrators and addresses performance drops under load that occur with a standalone SQLite setup, as heavy processing inside JavaScript/Python nodes can stall the primary web service or exhaust single-server resources.
This guide offers a practical way to scale n8n beyond a single server without complex orchestration.