I would say (X)aaS (whatever as a service) is probably a better term... like DBaaS in this case, vs Serverless as in in-process, which is probably a closer and better use of the term.

What was wrong with "managed"? It's pretty generic and transfers across many domains and also, more fairly descriptive of what's going on.

"managed" is an AWS instance or a digital ocean droplet. "serverless" is an entirely different thing.

"Serverless" is another level of abstraction and management, that's it. Are you proposing that a term collision adds too much confusion?

"Managed" hosting has been around for decades as have "managed" services, in general, long before Amazon even existed. EC2 brought a new level/layer of automation and management ontop of what colo datacenters used to do, provide scaling etc. To be clear I'm not saying it's simple but "managed" describes much of it.

I would argue that the architectural implications of using a "run individual functions on a remote pool of computing resources and build your client application around this pattern and only pay for the exact amount of compute time you use" is not sufficiently covered by the term "managed". I think there could have perhaps been a better name than "serverless" chosen, but that's the name enough people have agreed on to use when talking about this specific architecture that it would be difficult to use another one.

Agreed, I'm not big in devops, but I can see the usefulness of it if you're already part of a cloud provider, but like I said I only know of the capabilities of it in Azure, I'm not familiar with the capabilities elsewhere.