Superposition - a flexible, safe and powerful Open Source Configuration Management System

This talk introduces a new Open Source Project called "Superposition". The project is Apache 2.0 licensed and is hosted at https://github.com/juspay/superposition.

We'd like to cover the following in the talk

1. The problem space that Superposition intends to solve
2. High-level component architecture of Superposition
3. A live demonstration of the key features
4. Current production usage
5. Why Superposition should be part of your toolkit if you want to build configurable applications

For a more detailed walk-through of what to expect in the presentation, one can review the slides at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IgZro3svxQ39DXGKX0duUy2ohTg434IA/view

Brief context on why we built Superposition and the problems it solves:

Most non-trivial applications need a robust and flexible configuration system. Such a system becomes all the more important when the same feature needs to behave differently for different users. At Juspay, we needed a configuration system with the following properties:

1. First, it should be flexible, allowing teams to make changes quickly without application deployment.
2. Second, it should be Safe - ensuring that the value provided for a configuration is type correct, and the rollout of such a change is staggered.

We looked around for off-the-shelf software and did not find anything that met these requirements, so we built Superposition.

Superposition is a context-based configuration management system designed to facilitate safe and flexible rollout of config changes.

This is enabled by two key components of Superposition.

1. Context Aware Config (CAC) - Lets you do granular configuration based on contextual data.
2. Experimentation - Lets you do A/B configuration deployment, allowing controlled rollout and rollback mechanisms.

From discussions with multiple teams, we felt our requirements for a configuration system are universal. Teams inside Juspay like Juspay Portal, Hyper SDK and Namma Yatri have started to leverage Superposition to manage their complex configuration use-cases in production. Given the wide applicability of such a configuration system and Juspay's commitment to open source software, we decided to open source it and we would like to introduce it to the world in the India FOSS conference.