The Canvas Looks Clean Until Something Fails n8n workflows make a messy business process look tidy. A trigger starts the run. A few nodes process the file. A few more nodes write rows, send notifications, or generate output. On the canvas, the workflow looks like one system. In production, it may be five systems pretending to be one. An invoice workflow might use one OCR provider, one LLM provider, one spreadsheet service, one PDF generator, one storage provider, and one Slack notification. A product catalog workflow might use one image tool, one background-removal API, one database, one sheet exporter, and one file host. That can work for a demo. It is also where many n8n automations become fragile: the canvas hides the operational seams. The problem is not that n8n is bad at workflows. n8n is good at workflows. The problem is that every vendor boundary brings its own credentials, data shapes, limits, retry behavior, billing model, and failure state.…