This unified construction removes most backend-specific code from
global.go. The backend registry will also enable integration tests to
use custom backends if necessary.
In order to change the backend initialization in `global.go` to be able
to generically call cfg.ApplyEnvironment() for supported backends, the
`interface{}` returned by `ParseConfig` must contain a pointer to the
configuration.
An alternative would be to use reflection to convert the type from
`interface{}(Config)` to `interface{}(*Config)` (from value to pointer
type). However, this would just complicate the type mess further.
