Given the ever-increasing importance of configuration tasks for the provisioning of a wide range of IP resources, networks, and services in today's Internet, this draft aims at listing the basic requirements that should drive the specification of a protocol to convey configuration information towards network devices. This memo doesn't aim at listing candidate protocols to convey such information, nor at choosing one of these. This draft basically describes a whole set of issues a service provider has to deal with, hence a list of requirements to better address such issues.