1. A method of using an electronic device having a processor, a memory, and at least one configurable hardware component, comprising: receiving instructions in an Infrastructure Description Language (IDL) indicative of at least one of: one or more Service Level Hints (SLHs) indicative of application characteristics of a software application affecting hardware requirements in a runtime environment, and one or more Service Level Requirements (SLRs) corresponding to specific requests for a hardware performance optimization in the runtime environment; and using the instructions at runtime of the application to obtain a hardware configuration consistent with at least one of the SLHs and the SLRs, and to dynamically configure at least one hardware infrastructure resource utilized by the application based on the hardware configuration.