At our shop we prefer scripting, automation and automatically deployed/centrally configured config over GUIs. The learning curve may be a little higher, but once you've got a taste for how quickly you can do things with scripts, Puppet etc. and how fast you can scale out, you'll find that you actually _save_ countless hours.

We can also use virtualisation everywhere, for testing, quick deployment, offsite deployment, cloud... without worrying about licenses.

The fact that EC2 Linux is significantly cheaper than Azure is just a bonus.