anchor.diff:  
   Another added advantage of this approach is that it forces consistent practices with organizing configuration by application, and environment.  
   
  -There are a number of purpose built external configuration servers you could consider. The Spring cloud config server is a good option for Spring applications. With support for multiple backends, you could integrate with industry standard KV stores such as Consul for non-sensitive configuration, and Vault for sensitive configuration. 
  +There are a number of purpose built external configuration servers you could consider. The Spring cloud config server is a good option for Spring applications. With support for multiple backends, you could integrate with industry standard KV stores such as [Consul](https://www.consul.io) for non-sensitive configuration, and [Vault](https://www.vaultproject.io/) for sensitive configuration. 
   
   ##2: Standard process for distributing configuration
   
   For microservices systems, it is possible to have different tech stacks across the systems. If one is handling configuration differently for different stacks, then the complexity becomes hard to manage. Therefore, regardless of the tech stack of a microservice, configurations should be distributed to nodes in a standard manner. 
   
  -A technique we use is to supply configuration as environment variables per The Twelve-Factor App methodology. As a rule of thumb, always avoid distributing configuration files. 
  +A technique we use is to supply configuration as environment variables per The [Twelve-Factor App](https://12factor.net/) methodology. As a rule of thumb, always avoid distributing configuration files. 
   
   The Twelve-Factor app is a manifesto that provides some guidelines to be followed while building cloud-native applications. These guidelines let you build applications that are cloud-friendly. To truly harness the advantages of a cloud environment, an application needs to embrace cloud concepts such as elastic scalability, independently deployable and operable services, and statelessness. 
   
  
positive.code: 
  This central store gives you traceability on how and when policies were changed. That traceability goes a long way in setting up a governance process.
  
  A tool we recommend to store secrets is the Vault by Hashicorp. 
  
  **Example:**
  
  
negative.code: 
  ##Summary
  
  This is the part 5 of our [CD for Microservices blog series](https://www.gocd.org/tags/cd-for-microservices.html). We have talked about configuration strategy for your CD pipeline. In the next post, we will talk about the last consideration: remediation strategies for when something goes wrong. 
  
  
  