At the application level, the running instances are literal similarities. For example PRODUCTION, QA, DEVELOPMENT. The configuration at this level is typically the attribute mapping of this analogy. IOC mechanisms can be used to add operations to the application analogy.
The core concept here is that our mind naturally breaks down the problem into analogies during analysis. These are then coded using the choice of analogy structure appriopriate for the associations of the implementations to produce chunks that are cohesive.
This concept of structures in the problem domain mapping directly to code structures has already been raised by Coplien in his Multi-paradigm design.