Developers, DevOps enthusiasts, and AI hobbyists looking to move away from proprietary SaaS models. Ideal for those who value data privacy and want to build automation workflows that run entirely on their own hardware.

Basic familiarity with the Command Line (Terminal/PowerShell), use Docker or npm as environment to install n8n

Course Outline:

1. Infrastructure: Deploying the Foundation
2. 1. 1. Docker Advantage: Why containerization is key for sovereign stacks
      2. Docker Compose Walkthrough: Configuring docker-compose.yml for n8n
      3. Persistence & Environment: Setting up volumes for data retention & securing the instance with environment variables
      4. Lab: Launching the n8n container and initial setup
   2. The “Brain” Connection: Local vs Cloud Inference
      1. Ollama Deep-Dive: Installing Ollama and pulling models (DeepSeek-R1 / Llama 3)
      2. Local Hardware Optimization: Understanding CPU vs GPU utilization for local LLMs
      3. The Safety Net: Configuring Open Router (openrouter.ai) for high-reasoning tasks for cloud fallback
      4. Lab: Testing the Ollama API locally via terminal