Thanks for sharing your feeling about this.
It looks like you're working on almost exactly the same project, and that the big challenge is getting access to server hardware for webbrowsing, because not only are AWS etc expensive, they primarily offer "webservers" optimized for very light not very CPU intensive workloads, and needless to say they also don't offer hardware accelerated video decoding.
Wow! Sounds like you're doing something interesting. Are you uninterested in collaboration? I was thinking of ways to make the video better, but right now I'm basically just using DIY "MJPEG" over websocket.
As for the server hardware, I was decided to join the Stripe Atlas program at the start of 2017, and from that I was able to get 5K in AWS credits, and then more Google Cloud credits, and I also applied to IBM and Digital Ocean on my own and got credits from them as well.
So, so far I have been able to develop and then demo this (like today) without significant monetary cost.
I also have some tips for you, because resource usage was one of my concerns, but TBH I find Chrome headless actually always uses less CPU than I imagine. It's all about the page that it is rendering. The page determines everything, but Chrome itself is very light. So when I've budgeted for like 1 CPU per user, it's actually possible to get much more than that. And memory is the big thing that Chrome does lightly, it uses barely any RAM even with 100s of users on a machine. I was surprised by that. 100 users running Chrome and only ~ 20 Gb of RAM used.
Also, regarding video, because I'm avoiding expensive video encoding (just sending screenshots) I avoid the CPU load of doing that. I've experimented with doing more processing of the frames, but it just throws the load way off.
I chose to keep it simple and I'm pleased with that. At the same time, I want to explore ways to improve image quality.
here's some personal notes from this. i didn't work on containerization, just raw VM setup. had to get x11 up and running and then set ffmpeg up for hardware streaming.
https://gist.github.com/gfodor/3c88700ee81a10e01c783019b8a64...