Depends what else it's solving for.

I've seen multiple issues solved like this after engineering teams have been cut to the bone.

If the cost of maintaining enough engineers to keep systems stable for more than 24 hours, is more than the cost of doubling the container count, then this is what happens

This. All the domain knowledge has left. This sounds like a Hacky work around at best which AWS will welcome you with open arms come invoice day.

Depends on how long it takes for the incoming instances to initialize and outgoing instances to fully decommission.

x = time it takes to switchover

y = length of the cycles

x/y = % increase in cost

For us, it's 15 minutes / 120 minutes = 12.5% increase, which was deemed acceptable enough for a small service.

Shouldn't be too high cost if you only run 2x the instances for a short amount of time. A reasonable use of Cloud, IMHO, if you can't figure out a less disruptive bandaid.

AWS has been charging by the second since 2017: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-per-second-billing-for-...