How I Work: The art of balancing

Tatramajjhattatā is the Buddhist word for neutrality of mind. It speaks about a balance that helps an individual keep their mind calm and healthy. This is crucial not only for individuals but also for eco-systems. Organisations are not any different and it is a microcosm of this complex infinite universe…

Do You Need A Personal OKR?

Design by Asif Jamal Making a contract with your future self When we started using OKRs in Grofers, it was to ensure that we had a way of getting everyone on the same page around what was important towards our goals as a team and as a company. This exercise taught us a lot and although we’ve failed in every…

Building a technology first company

Over the past few years, we have seen rise of tech companies. There are a lot of definitions of what truly is a technology company. There are also different terminologies like “tech driven”, “tech enabled” and “pure tech”. And the debate goes on… At Grofers, our vision is to be…

Supercharging Mobile Backend Development using ngrok & OpenResty

If you are developing mobile applications, it’s likely that you are getting data from a bunch of backend APIs. An API backend is a must if you want to develop for multiple platforms like Android, iOS, web etc While developing such API backend locally, sometimes you need…

How COVID-19 pushed us to reduce our AWS cost by half

We have been extremely focused on growth before COVID started. AWS is central to how we ship fast that helps fuel that growth. Some of our early mistakes resulted in wastage resulting in high costs over time. COVID-19 pushed us to bring more efficiency in our business operations to provide…

How We Sustain DNS Outages at Grofers

Design by Asif Jamal Cloudflare is one of the most popular DNS and CDN service provider currently used by over 16 million internet sites. Every day, these sites utilize Cloudflare’s services for performance enhancement, DDoS mitigation, and more. We do too. So when Cloudflare suffered multiple outages, it affected websites around the globe. And…

Giving the power of data in hands of your data analyst

Over the last 3 years, our data analytics team has grown from one central team of 4 to over 100 members. Our analysts are spread across our data team, business functions and data science teams. So needless to say, as both data and the team grew, our ways of working…

Is your MVP slowing you down?

Over time, the term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) has started meaning different things to different people. Before I proceed to put my point across, it will be helpful to…

Building Personalisation at Scale

I have talked about how we have been building a technology first company in my previous post. Taking this further, I am back with the next level of innovation we have been doing to make our customer journey as satisfying as its for us to serve them! At Grofers, our…

On Setting Up Our AWS VPC

TL;DR: This blog post is about the choices we made while trying to organize our infrastructure resources in AWS VPC and automating everything around it. Our Infrastructure So Far Since we signed up on AWS fairly recently, we were given a VPC by default. We used to launch EC2 instances seamlessly…

A crazy, wild, roller-coaster ride

It was towards the end of October 2014 that I came to know about Grofers. A friend of mine had…

Grofers Lambda: A 2019 Year-In-Review

The most-read authors, stories, and what’s coming in 2020. In 2019, we increased our focus on Lambda with an aim to share stories that give you an insider look into the tech and people that run Grofers. As a result, 2019 turned out to be an incredible year of learning for all of us at Grofers engineering. Best? our…

API Management at Grofers with Kong

As we scaled up our backend at Grofers, we moved from a monolithic service to a microservice architecture. Our monolithic service was written to handle tasks like authentication and rate limiting as a part of its code base. When we started to set up various microservices we…

Evolving Continuous Delivery in a Cloud-Native Environment

React Native at Grofers: Using React Native components inside native views

Horizontal scrolling widget has been built in…

Origins of Data Lake at Grofers

Design by Asif Jamal The Beginning As Data Engineers at the biggest online grocery company in India, one of our major challenges is to democratize data across the organization. But, when we began evaluating how well we were doing on this goal, we realized that frequent errors in our data pipelines had caused our business teams…

Securing AWS Access Keys

After a Friday night party, we found out that someone had accidentally put AWS Access Keys in a public repository (thanks to AWS Security Team for reporting this). Keys didn’t have much access and were of a test environment, but this could have happened with any other key pair with…

A Comprehensive Guide To Deploying A Website In Kubernetes

Recently, we at Grofers took a decision to migrate all our services to Kubernetes. Now during the process of migrating our frontend website to Kubernetes, we realised that the default Rolling Update deployment strategy doesn’t work that well and we had to shift to Blue Green strategy instead (we’ll go…

Community Update — March 2019 (Gurgaon)

For the Golang track, community member Ishaan Bahal talked about GRPC and its use cases from the ground up…

Community Update: Announcing Grofers Tech Talks!

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Get Your Product The Attention It Deserves

Design by Asif Jamal It’s Christmas time. You’re walking down that crowded market street. After having saved money for a long time, you’re now hunting for presents for your loved ones. You have narrowed down your idea of a gift and have decided to get them the best sweaters in town. Your friend tells you of a…

Exploratory Data Analysis of orders on Grofers

Transform your Automation Suite Into a Testing Product — Part 1

When we talk about the test product that is owned and managed by the testing team, what comes to your mind immediately. Is it a test suite, test management tool, or any defect tracking tool? I guess the most obvious one that comes to your mind is the test suite…

Open-sourcing codon: workflow framework for building aggregator APIs

As a startup, we need to experiment with our product a lot — constantly changing our UI and our backend processes to support new experimental features…

The Final Call — The good and the bad of React Native

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash This blog is part of the Grofers React Native blog series. Through this series we attempt to share the journey of integrating React…