Phoenix servers. See http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ImmutableServer.html Personally, I believe this is a non-confront of the complexity inherent in modern systems. It's a cop out! You're just saying, we don't need to know the details of the configuration to troubleshoot a problem, we'll just nuke it from orbit and create a new instance. But if you don't UNDERSTAND what went wrong, how can you control the situation well enough to fix it? (This is just not my client, I'm talking about the industry trend.)