> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://developers.stellar.org/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Prerequisites

> The RPC service can be installed on bare metal or a virtual machine.

The RPC service can be installed on bare metal or a virtual machine. It is natively supported on both Linux and Windows operating systems.

### Minimum Hardware Requirements

| Node Type | CPU | RAM | Disk | AWS SKU | Google Cloud SKU |
| - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Stellar RPC | 4-8 vCPUs | 16GB | 350 GB persistent volume >= 3K IOPS | [c5.2xlarge] | [n4-highcpu-8] |

*\* Disk: Assuming the default 7-day retention window for data storage. Otherwise, +40GB per retention day*

*\* RAM/CPU: Assuming RPC will serve a modest request volume (e.g. 100 requests per second across all endpoints). For deployments expecting heavier request volume to Stellar RPC (e.g. >500 requests per second), we recommend horizontal scaling and load balancing across at least 32GB of RAM and an appropriately scaled CPU.*

We highly recommend using a local SSD disk for storage. RPC is compatible with network-based filesystems like AWS EBS but it will negatively impact its performance.

[c5.2xlarge]: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/c5/

[n4-highcpu-8]: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/general-purpose-machines#n4-highcpu