I agree, one microservice = one app instance.
I used CodeIgniter since years and I want to stay on this framework. Symfony seems to be a good alternative for this kind of project, there is a lot of documentation to do this. Some topics explain the good way to create microservice with Symfony (or Laravel).
Is there also a good way to do that with CI? I didn't find any documentation or examples. It will be interesting to have an example.