Canonical is now offering a fully Managed Apps service

These prices really seem to be aimed at the "those who can pay" market. What I'm surprised at is the 99.99% uptime - I thought given their foray into telecoms they'd be offering some very complex cluster-driven solution to go higher on uptime.

My guess is this is a way to commercialize their snap packages and auto updates (plus reboot-less kernel updates) in an market where the alternative would be to hire sysadmins, and therefore they benchmark their pricing on that basis. One VM is cheaper than your first sysadmin, then they're an approved supplier so you go back for more and more.

It refers to https://osm.etsi.org/

In essence, it's an attempt at an open source management and orchestration layer for virtualized telecoms networks (i.e. 5G). In the telecoms world, since everything moves in 10 year standards cycles, they're only just moving off black box dedicated hardware towards white box.

Until now, management and orchestration has been vendor proprietary in the telecoms world, and this is an attempt to standardise an open and interoperable way of doing it, more like how we do in IT.

Don't read this to be a criticism of telecoms as being outdated or backward - they just have very different tolerances of breakage (which IT tolerates as inevitable or necessary or "move fast and break things"), so this is a big step. In many countries they have a 7 or 8x 9's uptime requirement on their main telecoms core network, and similar expectations even in access networks. NFV is network function virtualization, which is the move towards each component of a 5G network being software, rather than dedicated hardware, running in a hypervisor instead of on dedicated bespoke silicon.