Solana Node Operations

1. Hardware Requirements

Solana RPC Node (Mainnet)

Bare-Metal Providers

Provisioning is automated via crates/metal/ — supports Latitude, Cherry, Vultr, Scaleway, Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean, and on-prem via the Provider trait.

2. Building Agave from Source

Custom Agave build optimized for AMD EPYC (Zen 4/5) — enables AVX-512 + SHA-NI for 10-30% improvement on crypto hot paths.

# Dockerfile.agave — build optimized validator binary
FROM rust:1.86.0-slim-bookworm AS build

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    git clang cmake pkg-config libssl-dev \
    protobuf-compiler libudev-dev \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

ARG AGAVE_VERSION=v2.2.20

RUN git clone --depth 1 --branch $AGAVE_VERSION \
    https://github.com/anza-xyz/agave.git /agave

WORKDIR /agave

# Target znver4 (Zen 4) — closest stable LLVM target to Zen 5
# Enables: AVX-512, SHA-NI, VAES, VPCLMULQDQ
ENV RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=znver4"

RUN ./scripts/cargo-install-all.sh --validator-only .
RUN strip /agave/bin/*

# --- Runtime ---
FROM debian:bookworm-slim
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y ca-certificates curl jq \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
COPY --from=build /agave/bin/ /usr/local/bin/

# jemalloc tuning for Solana's allocation patterns
ENV MALLOC_CONF="background_thread:true,metadata_thp:always,dirty_decay_ms:3000"
ENTRYPOINT ["agave-validator"]

# Build and push
docker build --build-arg AGAVE_VERSION=v2.2.20 \
  -t ghcr.io/5dlabs/agave:v2.2.20-znver4 \
  -f Dockerfile.agave .
docker push ghcr.io/5dlabs/agave:v2.2.20-znver4

3. Yellowstone gRPC Plugin

Real-time gRPC streaming from the validator via Yellowstone geyser plugin.

# Dockerfile.yellowstone-grpc — build geyser plugin .so
FROM rust:1.86-slim-bookworm AS build
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    git clang cmake pkg-config libssl-dev protobuf-compiler \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

ARG YELLOWSTONE_VERSION=v12.2.0+solana.3.1.10

RUN git clone --depth 1 --branch "${YELLOWSTONE_VERSION}" \
    https://github.com/rpcpool/yellowstone-grpc.git /yellowstone-grpc
WORKDIR /yellowstone-grpc
RUN cargo build --release --package yellowstone-grpc-geyser
RUN mkdir -p /output \
    && cp target/release/libyellowstone_grpc_geyser.so /output/ \
    && strip /output/libyellowstone_grpc_geyser.so

FROM scratch
COPY --from=build /output/libyellowstone_grpc_geyser.so /output/

# Extract and deploy .so to the Solana node
docker create --name ys-extract yellowstone-grpc-builder:v3.1.x
docker cp ys-extract:/output/libyellowstone_grpc_geyser.so .
docker rm ys-extract
scp libyellowstone_grpc_geyser.so solana-rpc-01:/var/mnt/yellowstone/lib/

4. Kubernetes Deployment

Agave RPC Deployment

apiVersion: apps/v1