1GB VM. How do I pack whole production stack to it.
I'm running a full production backend on GCP's free-tier e2-micro: 2 vCPUs, 1GB RAM. Fastify, PostgreSQL 18, Redis, nginx, systemd, TLS, the whole thing. It works, it's fast, and it costs me nothin...

Source: DEV Community
I'm running a full production backend on GCP's free-tier e2-micro: 2 vCPUs, 1GB RAM. Fastify, PostgreSQL 18, Redis, nginx, systemd, TLS, the whole thing. It works, it's fast, and it costs me nothing while I validate the product. TLDR A 2-vCPU, 1GB VM is way bigger than you think. With some tuning you can fit a real stack on it, handle hundreds of users, and not pay a dime until you have revenue. Define the playbook once, and you can scale up or migrate to any provider by replaying the same sequence. What I'm running The app is Inner Anchor. It's a productivity app: daily management, task management, focus mode with a floating DPIP (Document Picture-in-Picture) button that reminds you what you're doing, and a purpose bar to remind you why you're doing it. The backend is Fastify with PostgreSQL and a small Redis. Right now it's pre-revenue with a few dozen beta testers. Why a raw VM instead of Railway or Render I want to deploy on the server the same way I would scale the server. I want