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…

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…

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…

Launch quickly, inspect closely, iterate rapidly

The Final Call — The good and the bad of React Native

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash This blog is part of the Grofers React Native blog series. Through this series we attempt to share the journey of integrating React…

Anomaly detection using Isolation forest

Hoomans, emotions, products and other crises.

Wait, back up! Let’s take…

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…

Making Grocery Shopping Faster on Web

We released Grofers’ web platform about two months back. This post describes a few performance improvements that we have achieved in recent times. Background To bring about more user engagement and open the most straightforward user acquisition channel, we released our web platform to make it possible for…

Improving Web Performance with Code Splitting and Resource Hints

Background In our previous post about performance optimization on Grofers.com, we discussed how we split our single large JS bundle…

Exploratory Data Analysis of orders on Grofers

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

The biggest…

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…

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…

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…

Community Development @ Grofers

Photo taken at a meetup we hosted. This upcoming Saturday(October 27th), we will be hosting meetups themed around Android, Python, and Kubernetes. This will be a great day to come by the office and chat with the people that built Grofers. Be sure to bring your laptop(someplace to put all the stickers.)

Evolving Continuous Delivery in a Cloud-Native Environment

On Setting Up Our AWS VPC

TL;DR: This blog post is about the choices we made while trying to organize our infrastructure resources in AWS VPC and automating everything around it. Our Infrastructure So Far Since we signed up on AWS fairly recently, we were given a VPC by default. We used to launch EC2 instances seamlessly…

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

Horizontal scrolling widget has been built in…

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…

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…

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!

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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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…