Hive

Because of how the swarm is structured, we recommend that users wishing to scale up their Bee operation, or set up a commercial Bee hive should seek to run many instances of Bee simultaneously. Read The Book of Swarm for more information on how the swarm comes together.

Swarm provides tooling to help you install many Bees at once.

Docker

Up to date Docker images for Bee are provided.

Docker-Compose

It becomes easier to run multiple Bee nodes with docker-compose. Check out the Docker compose section of the Docker README.

Helm

If you really want to run a lot of Bee nodes and you have experience using Kubernetes with Helm, you can have a look at how we manage our cluster under Ethersphere/helm.

Manually

If you just want to run a handful of bee nodes, you can run multiple bee nodes by creating separate configuration files.

Create your first configuration file by running

bee printconfig &> bee-config-1.yaml

Make as many copies of bee-config-1.yaml as you want to run bee nodes. Increment the number in the name (bee-config-1 to bee-config-2) for each new configuration file.

Configure your nodes as desired, but ensure that the values api-addr, data-dir and p2p-addr are unique for each configuration.

Monitoring

See the monitoring section on how to access Bee's internal metrics! Share your community creations (like swarmMonitor - thanks doristeo!) in the #node-operators channel of our Discord server so we can add you to our list of all things that are awesome and Swarm. 🧡