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…

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…

CPU Throttling in Kubernetes: A Postmortem

Kubernetes is a crucial part of our infrastructure. We don’t just deploy applications on Kubernetes in production, but we also use it heavily for our CI/CD and developer infrastructure. While developing our CI/CD infrastructure, we dealt with a particular performance issue of our dev and CI environments taking up a…

How I Started Working With Kubernetes

Animation by Asif Jamal I first heard about Kubernetes in 2016. When Docker was the new boom, Kubernetes was introduced as a prototype system to manage containers. Though I was unsure of getting into it, I passed it at that time as I was content with containers and didn’t need any orchestration. However, when…

The Power of a Tech Community

Let’s talk tech — Organised by Women who code in collaboration with Grofers. “Community is much more than belonging to something; it is about doing something together that makes belonging matter” — Brian Solis When I was in college, I had a clear agenda in place. I had decided to spend less time figuring out the next class I had to attend…

Evolving Continuous Delivery in a Cloud-Native Environment

Ansible at Grofers (Part 1) — Introduction

About a year ago, we started setting up our infrastructure platform to make daily system operations and infrastructure maintenance easy and enable our developers in a way that they can move faster. This post is part one of a series on how we use Ansible at Grofers…

How DevOps Is Making Managers Redundant And Why That’s a Good Thing

A guide to scaling tech organizations without adding too many people or processes. I head product and engineering for Grofers, the largest online grocer in India. Grofers has grown by over 11x — from $60MM in GMV to nearly $700MM — in the last 24 months. A big part of this success has been the ability of our team to go from idea…

Grofers Virtual Hackday 2020

Everyone at Grofers Tech loves Hackathons because this is one day when we forget all the worries of the world and jump right into solving problems. Be it an old idea solved using a new tech or a new idea solved with just an excel prototype, this is a day…

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…

Reducing data transfer costs with a Docker registry cache

Community Update: Announcing Grofers Tech Talks!

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How To Decide The Success Metrics For Your Product

Design by Asif Jamal I have repeatedly made this mistake of looking at the wrong metrics for the new products that we released. The realization of these mistakes made me seek mentoring from some of the accomplished product folks. I wish I had reached out for their mentoring even earlier to grow faster. Young…

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…

Community Update — March 2019 (Gurgaon)

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

Credentials leaked in public? Here’s what Grofers implemented to prevent such mishaps!

The biggest…

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

Horizontal scrolling widget has been built in…

Ansible at Grofers (Part 4) — Manageable auto-scaling with Ansible

Auto-Scaling Groups (ASG) in AWS EC2 provide a really easy way to scale your services horizontally based on different kinds of alarms. It launches instances using existing AMIs baked by you for your services. While ASGs are easy to understand at a high level, they have their own challenges —…

Community Update — March 2019 (Bangalore)

Grofers Public Bug Bounty Program

Grofers recognizes the importance of continued security research toward helping keep our ecosystem (and customers’ data) safe. In continuation of our efforts in this area, we are excited to announce the launch of the “Grofers Public Bug Bounty Program.” With this program we encourage any security researchers, ethical hackers and…

Learnings From Two Years of Kubernetes in Production

Almost two years back, we took the decision to leave behind our Ansible based configuration management setup for deploying applications on EC2 and move towards containerisation and orchestration of applications using Kubernetes. We have migrated most of our infrastructure to Kubernetes. It was a big undertaking and had its own…

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…

Personal Staging Environment for Micro-Services Architecture

Grofers has been following micro-services architecture for a while now. While there are plenty of advantages…

Postmortem: Outage due to Elasticsearch’s flexibility and our carelessness

On November 25 at 4:30 AM, our consumer apps stopped working because of some issue with our backend API. This article is a postmortem of what happened that night. Some Background Our product search and navigation is served from Elasticsearch. We create daily index of products, related merchant data…

Progressive Web Apps, UX and Engagement

In the past few years, Web Applications and Smartphone based Mobile Applications have played a…