Welcome to the first article in the series of EAD (= Enterprise Application Development). Applications developed and designed for enterprise environments are often complicated, hard to maintain, tricky to deploy, barely monitorable and often suffer from a mixture of “why is this even a service” and “how the fuck can one service do so many things”. This article series is supposed to guide you through essential techniques and best practices, to prevent applications from being tech-debt right from the beginning. Each article will tackle another aspect that makes an application a charm for developers, operations, administrators and users. The first article is about properly configuring services and applications.