There was another article about building this structure into a single, self-contained executable and decide via command line arguments which piece(s) to use at startup. For some reason I remember "microlith", but it must be another clever word combination because I can not find any relevant HN posts, just one about archaeology...

You can run a single copy of the resulting binary (eg. for testing) that spins up all sub-components, or copy it to multiple machines and start individual parts. The ones which happen to run together can use in-process communication as well, others will have to dial in via remoting.