Developing, deploying, and operating an application in a plurality of environments is disclosed, including: defining runtime specific configuration information for a plurality of environments, wherein the runtime environment specific configuration includes topology configuration and security configuration, wherein the runtime environment specific configuration information is stored separately from other configuration information and is protected by an identity management system; executing an application in one of the plurality of environments, wherein execution of the application is controlled by a first role; and presenting a credential associated with the first role to the identity management system to obtain a portion of the runtime environment specific configuration information corresponding to the environment associated with the executing application.