N8N - Simple Stateful Deployment

Small update to the ephemeral deployment of n8n that we covered in Deploy n8n on K8s with the 8gears chart

We will be making it stateful in this article by attaching a persistent volume using Oracle Block Volumes.

Create Low-Cost Storage Class

I'm already using the 200GB that comes with Oracle's free tier to run the k8s 4-node cluster. Unfortunately, you can't make a block volume with a smaller size than 50GB

It's probably overkill for this, but you can reduce cost by dropping the VPUs to 0. For this reason, we'll define a low-cost storage class:

############################
# (2b) Custom StorageClass tuned for 0 VPUs
############################
resource "kubernetes_storage_class_v1" "oci_bv_lower_cost" {
  metadata {
    name = "oci-bv-lower-cost"
  }

  storage_provisioner    = "blockvolume.csi.oraclecloud.com"
  reclaim_policy         = "Delete"
  volume_binding_mode    = "WaitForFirstConsumer"
  allow_volume_expansion = true

  parameters = {
    vpusPerGB = "0"
  }
}

We can then use it with 8gears chart:

n8n Stateful Deployment

Snippet from the chart

    # === Persistence managed by the chart ===
    persistence:
      enabled: true
      type: dynamic             # chart creates a PVC for you
      storageClass: ${kubernetes_storage_class_v1.oci_bv_lower_cost.metadata[0].name}
      accessModes:
        - ReadWriteOnce
      size: ${var.n8n_pvc_size}
      # optional: keep the PVC during helm uninstall
      # annotations:
      #   helm.sh/resource-policy: keep
    # Ensure single replica with SQLite
    replicaCount: 1

Source Code

08 March 2026