No, actually, it's very common terminology among people managing large enough installations to "treat servers as cattle, not like pets". Re-deploying the entire service, with a copy of the previous data or without, should be a common exercise.
We (I work for AWS) call it "Architecting for Failure", but yes, you could call it that too. =)
In an ideal application, instances are a commodity. Not every workload is there yet, so there's a need still for individual instance recovery. But it's something we and our customers strive for.
Is it really? I've never heard this particular wording before (and neither had Google, mind you) but it very strongly resembles Shoot The Other Node In The Head (STONITH).
