We've had great success with Powershell. It is already head and shoulders above VBScript, and has great community support. Where it has a surprising challenge is documentation. For some reason, Microsoft treats Powershell like a step child. Every new enterprise service they roll out has Powershell support, but there's no documentation on Powershell itself. Compare that with .net and there's a stark contrast. MSDN is amazing. One would think that with such a successful product (it really is great), MS would get behind it more.

This is why, regardless of whether you're in the cloud or not, you need to have the ability to fail over to multiple datacenters in different geographical locations. Availability Zones are good but don't cut it. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't make transferring backups between regions easy or cheap.