Some embodiments of the invention provide a forwarding element that can be configured through in-band data-plane messages from a remote controller that is a physically separate machine from the forwarding element. The forwarding element of some embodiments has data plane circuits that include several configurable message-processing stages, several storage queues, and a data-plane configurator. A set of one or more message-processing stages of the data plane are configured (1) to process configuration messages received by the data plane from the remote controller and (2) to store the configuration messages in a set of one or more storage queues. The data-plane configurator receives the configuration messages stored in the set of storage queues and configures one or more of the configurable message-processing stages based on configuration data in the configuration messages.