My own experience working at CoreOS is that many of our projects exploit self-referentiality as it's a particularly useful property. Off the top of my head: -

My own experience working at CoreOS is that many of our projects exploit self-referentiality as it's a particularly useful property. Off the top of my head: - Quay.io, our registry service, is built and deployed by itself - Clair, our static analysis tool for detecting security vulnerabilities, analyzes itself - Tectonic, our enterprise Kubernetes distro, is "self-driving" and manages itself - discovery.etcd.io, a service we run to make it easier to bootstrap new etcd quorums, is just a quorum of etcd nodes