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 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…

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…

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 —…

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…

What we have been shipping at Grofers

In March, COVID-19 changed a lot of things for the world. Grofers has been no exception. Unlike many business and economic scenarios that can be estimated or predicted for, COVID-19 stands as a tough exception. What this means for us is that our larger focus for March has been on…

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…

Exploratory Data Analysis of orders on Grofers

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 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…

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…

In focus: Vinayak Mehta

In focus is a blog series where we move the lens toward our engineers at Grofers and have a conversation on with them about things that make them tick. Vinayak is a software engineer in our data team and is based out of our Bangalore office. He joined us in…

React Native — The Sinner and the Saint

Design by Asif Jamal There’s been a lot of talk around React Native lately which discuss about its pros and cons and compare it with other cross-platform app frameworks like Flutter. Sadly, most of the blogs we see published today are centered around some or the other demo RN app being built from scratch. …

Anomaly detection using Isolation forest

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!

Hoomans, emotions, products and other crises.

Wait, back up! Let’s take…

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

The biggest…

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…

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…

How I Work: Devika Razdan

At Grofers, we have some of the smartest people who collaborate to do great work. Over the years, these individuals have crafted their own systems and tools for productivity and in this series, we share how they excel using the systems, methods, and tools that work for them. Over the…

Data and the bid to simplify grocery

The most critical thing for any business to understand is what their user is looking for and address those needs efficiently. This can be done through collecting explicit user feedback as well as by analyzing their behavior on the platform through the rich engagement…

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…

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…

Evolving Continuous Delivery in a Cloud-Native Environment

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…