Evolving Continuous Delivery in a Cloud-Native Environment

Giving the power of data in hands of your data analyst

Over the last 3 years, our data analytics team has grown from one central team of 4 to over 100 members. Our analysts are spread across our data team, business functions and data science teams. So needless to say, as both data and the team grew, our ways of working…

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…

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. …

Launch quickly, inspect closely, iterate rapidly

Show and Tell S02E01

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 I Work: The art of balancing

Tatramajjhattatā is the Buddhist word for neutrality of mind. It speaks about a balance that helps an individual keep their mind calm and healthy. This is crucial not only for individuals but also for eco-systems. Organisations are not any different and it is a microcosm of this complex infinite universe…

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…

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…

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…

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…

How We Improved Information Security at Grofers

How we load tested our APIs in Production

Grofers’ microservices based infrastructure currently handles around 400K Daily Active Users(DAU). One of the goals of the engineering team this quarter is to make sure our servers are robust enough to handle load at 2.5X of this number i.e. 1 million DAUs. Both availability and performance of our APIs are…

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

Horizontal scrolling widget has been built in…

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…

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

The biggest…

Anomaly detection using Isolation forest

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!