As we know, the microservice architecture consists of a number of small and independently deployable microservices that handle end-user calls and interact with each other. Based on the project's needs, they may run in various environments, such as development, testing, staging, production, and so on. To improve the scaling capabilities of an application, there may be multiple instances of microservices configured to work with the load balancer.

Each microservice possesses a set of configurations, including database configurations, interaction with other services, message broker configurations, and custom configurations. Handling microservice configurations between various environments is one of the most challenging parts of a microservice architecture.

Maintaining each microservices configuration manually would be too complex and difficult for the operations team. The best possible solution is to separate the configuration out from each microservice and maintain them all in one central place. This way, the dependency of environments on configuration can be handled more effectively. 

Spring Cloud provides a component called Spring Cloud Config, which is used to externalize the microservice configuration. It uses a Git repository to store all the configurations in one place, as shown in the following diagram:

We will create a separate service for central configuration with the Spring Cloud Config feature. The next few sections explain how to do this.