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

The biggest…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Launch quickly, inspect closely, iterate rapidly

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…

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…

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…

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…

Personal Staging Environment for Micro-Services Architecture

Grofers has been following micro-services architecture for a while now. While there are plenty of advantages…

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…

Designers, Good Designers, And Great Designers

To design is to solve a problem. And we solve problems all day long! Does that make everyone a designer? Got into a fight with your partner? Here are some possible solutions: Shout and scream until you explode Bring them flowers Whip yourself a hundred times in an act of self-flagellation Write a card Buy them a present Stop talking and hope they forget about it (my favourite), etc. Finally…

Hoomans, emotions, products and other crises.

Wait, back up! Let’s take…

Reducing data transfer costs with a Docker registry cache

Software Engineering Internship at Grofers

Internships are a training ground for the professional “real world”. What exactly does the “real world” entail? How disjoint is it from what we learn at university? Am I equipped enough to step into this simulation of the…

Community Update: Announcing Grofers Tech Talks!

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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…

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…

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…

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…

How We Improved Information Security at Grofers