I wouldn't say it's super wasteful, but there is waste involved since he's on AWS. AWS bills EC2 usage hourly, and doesn't do fractional billing. If you deploy,

I wouldn't say it's super wasteful, but there is waste involved since he's on AWS. AWS bills EC2 usage hourly, and doesn't do fractional billing. If you deploy, then 5 minutes later deploy again (and provision a new instance and destroy the first) you'll still pay for the full hour of that first instance. So every deploy incurs that usage rounding. Depending on the frequency of deploys and the number of servers being deployed to, that adds up.