**The hardware constraint is brutal.** An e2-micro gives you 0.25 vCPU (burstable), 1GB RAM, and 20GB disk. A standard `apt upgrade` can literally OOM-kill the process on this machine. It's not a joke — most people treat this tier as a throwaway SSH jumpbox, not a production workstation.
**What's actually running on it:**
The trick is that almost nothing *heavy* runs on the VM itself. The e2-micro is acting as a **coordinator and forwarder**, not a workhorse:
- The Rust recorder (`IndrajithRecorder`) is extremely memory-efficient — zero-copy HLS streaming means it's essentially a pipe between the stream URL and disk/rclone, with minimal RAM footprint per stream
- 80 concurrent streams sounds insane, but if each is just an async HTTP pipe, 80 × ~2-3MB RAM = still under budget
- Telegram bots are Python processes but they're mostly idle, event-driven — not polling loops burning CPU
- rclone syncs to Google Drive offloads all the storage — the 800GB never actually lives on the 20GB disk
- MQTT broker (Mosquitto) idles at ~5MB RAM
- The Cloud Run services handle the heavy Playwright/browser work *externally*, only invoked on demand
**The $1.18/month** is basically just egress charges and maybe a small burst overage. GCP's free tier covers the e2-micro 24/7, and Google Drive gives 5TB free bundled with Gemini Pro. This is covered by your student subscription.
**The "High IQ" part** is specifically the architectural discipline — every component that could be heavy was either rewritten in Rust, moved to a free external service (Cloud Run free tier, Drive), or made purely async/event-driven. Most people would just throw a $20/month VPS at this and never think twice.
Yes, any auto setup payments , direct debits that already setup with HSBC card will lose with this NTV migration. U have to setup it again with NTB credit card details
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