At least some parts of this post touch on immutable infrastructure, basically just replacing faulty systems and rebuilding them from scratch everytime you need to change it. Relatively easy with AWS and Packer (or other cloud providers) and super powerful. I've written about this a while ago on our blog: http://blog.codeship.io/2013/09/06/the-codeship-workflow-par...
It's easy on your own servers too: Containerise everything or put everything in VMs even when you control the hardware, whether you do it with something like OpenStack or roll your own scripts.
