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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

How DevOps Is Making Managers Redundant And Why That’s a Good Thing

A guide to scaling tech organizations without adding too many people or processes. I head product and engineering for Grofers, the largest online grocer in India. Grofers has grown by over 11x — from $60MM in GMV to nearly $700MM — in the last 24 months. A big part of this success has been the ability of our team to go from idea…

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…

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…

Personal Staging Environment for Micro-Services Architecture

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

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. …

Hoomans, emotions, products and other crises.

Wait, back up! Let’s take…

Managing key-values in Consul using ConsulKV CRD

We have been deploying applications on Kubernetes for over two years. We mostly followed a lift-and-shift approach while migrating to Kubernetes. We looked for everything that Ansible used to do for us and tried to replicate it in Kubernetes. At first, everything seemed to work. But over time we realized…

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

The biggest…

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 —…

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…

Community Update — March 2019 (Gurgaon)

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

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…

The Power of a Tech Community

Let’s talk tech — Organised by Women who code in collaboration with Grofers. “Community is much more than belonging to something; it is about doing something together that makes belonging matter” — Brian Solis When I was in college, I had a clear agenda in place. I had decided to spend less time figuring out the next class I had to attend…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

Horizontal scrolling widget has been built in…

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…