Reducing data transfer costs with a Docker registry cache

Anomaly detection using Isolation forest

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…

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…

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…

Exploratory Data Analysis of orders on Grofers

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

How to use your private NPM packages with Docker on CI

Our team recently came across a strange issue where one of our application was failing to build after we installed another internal library as a dependency to this app. This was very strange as we were able to get it working on our local machines and the only thing separating…

Community Update: Announcing Grofers Tech Talks!

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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…

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 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…

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 —…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. …

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…

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…