See Pieter Levels who is running alone (with the help of a freelance sys admin I believe) multiple high traffic web projects on a single VPS with crazy numbers (and supposedly a unique index.php for each project ) https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1506202608104783878

That's not distributed then (OP was asking about distributed services without containers).

Barcelona Spain, Remote, (Full Time | Contract | Part Time)

Stack: PHP (Symfony2, Laravel), Python (Django, Flask), Javascript, Mysql, Redis, Mongodb, HTML5, CSS

Resume: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinsaliou

Contact: kevin [at] saliou [dot] name

Senior full stack web developer looking to be take part in cool remote projects and able to travel from time to time for face to face meetings (I love Maps and Open Data ;) ).