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…

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…

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…

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

The biggest…

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…

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…

Building a technology first company

Over the past few years, we have seen rise of tech companies. There are a lot of definitions of what truly is a technology company. There are also different terminologies like “tech driven”, “tech enabled” and “pure tech”. And the debate goes on… At Grofers, our vision is to be…

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…

Personal Staging Environment for Micro-Services Architecture

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

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…

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…

Progressive Web Apps, UX and Engagement

In the past few years, Web Applications and Smartphone based Mobile Applications have played a…

It’s a million small things that matter

I joined Grofers in July 2018 from a young startup to throw myself into a previously unexplored territory of the Indian e-commerce and to experience product management at 10x the scale I have been working at. To my delight, the last four months have been no less than a roller…

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…

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…

Community Update — March 2019 (Gurgaon)

For the Golang track, community member Ishaan Bahal talked about GRPC and its use cases from the ground up…

Learnings From Two Years of Kubernetes in Production

Almost two years back, we took the decision to leave behind our Ansible based configuration management setup for deploying applications on EC2 and move towards containerisation and orchestration of applications using Kubernetes. We have migrated most of our infrastructure to Kubernetes. It was a big undertaking and had its own…

Show and Tell S02E01

Exploratory Data Analysis of orders on Grofers

In Focus: Sancheeta Kaushal

Sancheeta is an engineering manager with the innovation team at grofers. She is an old timer who joined us way back in June 2015. Her work at grofers goes beyond her current team and you can find her organising events and forming communities in her free time. Here are some…

Supercharging Mobile Backend Development using ngrok & OpenResty

If you are developing mobile applications, it’s likely that you are getting data from a bunch of backend APIs. An API backend is a must if you want to develop for multiple platforms like Android, iOS, web etc While developing such API backend locally, sometimes you need…

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…

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…