Why physical storage of your database tables might matter

In our quest to simplify and enrich online grocery shopping for our users, we experimented with serving personalized item recommendations to each one of them. For this we operated in batch mode and pre computed relevant top 200 item recommendations for each user and dumped the results in a table…

How Continuous Github Code Hacking Keeps Grofers Secure

Security shouldn’t be treated as an after-thought Design by Asif Jamal When it comes to security, we always take it as the utmost priority. We strongly believe that “Security shouldn’t be treated as an after-thought”, it should be brought as close to engineers and as early in SDLC. Aside from the general guidelines put forth in the CIS benchmark for all…

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…

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…

Monitoring Java Web Apps using Prometheus and Grafana

Recently, I have been exploring ways to make systems as monitorable as possible, which means minimizing the number of unknown-unknowns!

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Reducing AWS data transfer cost: Kubernetes from Multi-AZ to Single-AZ

The only silver lining for us during COVID-19 was that we got a chance to optimize our resources in our run to cut costs — a long-pending activity. All the teams across the organization were focused on reducing the operating costs as much as possible. Similarly, DevOps teams were mainly…

How Grofers Doubled The VIP Pass Purchase Conversion For India’s Biggest Grocery Sale

The GOBD sale. The e-commerce sector in India continues to grow rapidly with major peaks around the holiday period. Sometimes a good ol’ sale will give you a baseline jump faster than any new product initiative on a fixed scale of time. Making the sale big therefore is of paramount importance. At Grofers…

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…

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…

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…

Ansible at Grofers (Part 3) — Managing EC2 Instances

This post is part 3 of the series on how we use Ansible at Grofers to manage our infrastructure. This post explains the issues we faced before we started managing our infrastructure with Ansible, the steps we took to solve all those issues and the infrastructure state we are in…

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…

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…

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…

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

The biggest…

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…

Iris — Merchant Discovery at Grofers

A, C, and E are the visible merchants Each merchant in our system has the following characteristics: Merchant location Merchant serviceability distance (i.e. places where the merchant delivers) As soon as the user opens the consumer app, the user location gets fired. We consider a list of…

Application Server Optimization

For the past few weeks, I have been working on improving our system. The improvements involve metrics related to latency. In this article, I am sharing some recipes that I found helpful in my work. This article will be Python-Django specific. I think it should be generally…

Managing key-values in Consul using ConsulKV CRD

We have been deploying applications on Kubernetes for over two years. We mostly followed a lift-and-shift approach while migrating to Kubernetes. We looked for everything that Ansible used to do for us and tried to replicate it in Kubernetes. At first, everything seemed to work. But over time we realized…