For the former, Rama has a class called "InProcessCluster" that works identically to a real cluster. It enables Rama applications to be tested and experimented with end-to-end. There's an example of this in the post and this is what we're releasing next week.
For the latter, Rama can be run on a single node with each daemon and module being a separate process. We made it really easy to launch single-node Rama instances with just a couple commands with the "rama" script that comes with the release. That said, we haven't spent much time yet optimizing small-scale Rama deployments and there's likely things we can do to make it more efficient (e.g. combine the Conductor and Supervisor daemons into a single process).