title: What's the best way to maintain application properties files?
body: <p>I am starting on a project where we provide an application container, deployment tools and services to application teams in our enterprise.</p>
  
  <p>Most of those teams deploy their applications in a large number of combinations of regions and environments.</p>
  
  <p>Frequently the application properties vary from region to region and env to env.</p>
  
  <p>We currently have a rube goldberg kind of process where we distribute a hierarchical set of properties, which are dynamically consumed into the application on startup. Some examples of properties might be JDBC strings, regional UI screen entitlements; etc, very application specific kinds of things.</p>
  
  <p>In our nextgen incarnation we would like to streamline the properties management. It seems like a pretty common problem and I am wondering if there are existing open source or otherwise solutions?</p>