VM is a Server. To manage servers you need server admins. And that is not software as a service situation. VM in a cloud makes that bad situation a bit worse. For VM in a cloud, you need cloud admin too. And a yearly subscription. In them pre-cloud days that was called a “Virtual Server”.
Latter the term “Private” was inserted and “Virtual Private Server” (VPS) was marketed as an “ideal solution”. It was apparently administered by a hosting company and it was much cheaper than a physical server. And it was part of a cluster to make it resilient. And reachable over a WAN in some secure remote location owned and administered by a hosting company.
And all was fine. Until physical server prices dropped through the floor. And until cloud computing appeared.
So what is this “Managed Instance” (MI) we are being sold these days? That is a VM with a driver and mechanic added. You are using it and they are managing it. That is where the price of luxury is coming from.
Serverless computing is made possible by clever infrastructure. In one shift one Microsoft data center is managed by 3 engineers, and that was approx 30000 VM’s.
MI is cheaper than VPS but not as cheap as serverless. Kubernetes is based on serverless.