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…

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…

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…

How We Improved Information Security at Grofers

What Is Product Management?

Design by Asif Jamal After talking to leaders of different expertise from multiple startups and being in a product role myself for over four years, I discovered that there is still ambiguity around what a product manager brings to the table. Although, a good part of my understanding of the role has been shaped…

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…

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…

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…

Making Grocery Shopping Faster on Web

We released Grofers’ web platform about two months back. This post describes a few performance improvements that we have achieved in recent times. Background To bring about more user engagement and open the most straightforward user acquisition channel, we released our web platform to make it possible for…

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…

Progressive Web Apps, UX and Engagement

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

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…

Community Update — March 2019 (Bangalore)

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…

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…

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…

5 not-so-basic basic guidelines to become a mediocre UX/UI/Product designer.

1. Don’t fall in love with your solutions. Fall in love with the problem. Reference to pop culture. Check. Nothing is written in stone. Especially your…

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…

Ansible at Grofers (Part 2) — Managing PostgreSQL

We have diverse data needs at Grofers. And we use different kinds of databases to fulfill different needs. We started with Postgres in the beginning as our primary data store. And even though we have become polyglot with databases, Postgres remains to be the most used database…

Adopting Tekton — Cloud Native CI Solution

We have been exploring Tekton as a CI platform recently for office and off-office work. So I thought to share all my findings with you. Tekton is a powerful yet flexible, Kubernetes-native open-source framework for creating continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) systems. But before we proceed, let’s see what…

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…

How My Grofers Internship Came To Be

Design by Asif Jamal In May 2019, I started my internship at Grofers — India’s largest online grocery retailer. I was joining the infrastructure team that has some of India’s smartest and most capable engineers working on problems of scale. Me? It was my first time working in a real, professional environment. I was…

Hoomans, emotions, products and other crises.

Wait, back up! Let’s take…

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…