A Day in Release Engineering at Grofers

This post touches up facets of what release engineering is at Grofers and what the life of an engineer on this team looks like. After reading this, one should get an idea about why it is important to us, what is an engineer supposed to do to support the team…

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…

Reducing data transfer costs with a Docker registry cache

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…

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. …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

Horizontal scrolling widget has been built in…

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…

The birth— Initial Project Setup

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash This is the second blog of the full Grofers RN blog series. Through this series Grofers attempts to share its journey in integrating React Native into…

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…

Exploratory Data Analysis of orders on Grofers

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Anomaly detection using Isolation forest