> ## Prerequisites

> Prerequisites for testing in Antithesis, and helpful information for preparing for a proof-of-concept with Antithesis.

> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://antithesis.com/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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This page lists technical prerequisites for testing your system in Antithesis. Ensuring that you have all these prerequisites ready before you start a Quickstart or Standard POC will help you get the most out of your trial.

## Suitable system types

Antithesis is primarily used for fault-tolerance testing of stateful distributed systems.

For testing program logic at the application level, we offer [Hegel](https://www.hegel.dev/), a universal property-based testing engine and family of libraries. Hegel is open source and available in many different languages.

For testing web or terminal UIs, we offer [Bombadil](https://github.com/antithesishq/bombadil), an open-source property-based testing tool.

## Architecture & compilation

**CPU Architecture:** Your code must be compiled for x86-64. Antithesis simulates an Intel CPU (Skylake architecture extension set) and does not natively support ARM or alternative CPU architectures at this time.

**No Nested Virtualization:** Nested hardware virtualization is not supported.

## Software packaging & orchestration

**Linux Container Images:** All components of your system must be packaged as standard Linux container images.

**Supported Orchestrators:** Your system topology must be defined with either Docker Compose or Kubernetes manifests.

We recommend containerizing your system before embarking on a Quickstart or Standard POC. Many of our customers have had AIs one-shot containerization, and AI skills are available for this.

## Complete network isolation

**There's no internet access inside the Antithesis environment**: Any third-party service your application connects to (e.g., databases, message queues, public APIs) need to be deployed alongside it.

There are two ways to do this:

1. Deploy the actual service, just as you would in production.
2. Upload a mock of the service.

Having these on hand before starting a Quickstart or Standard POC will help you make the most of the trial.

[Handling external dependencies](/docs/reference/dependencies/) has more details on how to do this.

## Client or test harness

**A driver or client to exercise your system**: This can be a simple client script or an existing integration test, and is referred to as a **workload** or **test template** in these docs. [Creating test templates](/docs/product/writing_tests/test_templates/first_test/) provides instructions on how to package your existing client / integration test for use in Antithesis.

Having a client or integration test prepared before starting a Quickstart or Standard POC will help you make the most of the trial.