How to get started with serverless apps on AWS

Amazon has workshops on Github!

This is really neat stuff. Amazon has a collection of several serverless workshops available on Github here:

https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-serverless-workshops

These workshops take you step by step through the entire process of creating several different types of serverless applications. Hopefully this will help demystify serverless for you.

Istio and transaction topology for serverless applications

I just watched this short video on Istio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iyFq2VaL5Y

Basically it's microservice plumbing for Kubernetes that adds security and telemetry. So I wondered if that telemetry included topology information and found that it DOES (or it can with a plugin):

https://istio.io/docs/tasks/telemetry/servicegraph/

So in some way off future, you'll be able to "automatically" obtain topology data without having to install and manage data collectors and agents (also without asking developers to instrument their code). Kinda neat.

Every enterprise is already using serverless applications in some form or another

If you have an application that makes a call to an external application, then you're on the calling side of a serverless application. Here's a high level graphic to illustrate my point:

You essentially have no insight into how the Results are generated by the "cloud" you're accessing via IP address or hostname. So you're accessing a service, but the actual server part of that interaction is abstracted from you.

Here's a great article on the concept of "Servicefull Serverless" to go into more detail about this:

https://www.infoq.com/articles/serverless-sea-change

Now, the current definition of "serverless" leverages all kinds of possible technologies like AWS Lambda or Whisk or even Cloudflare Isolates, on top of containers and Kubernetes running in VMs (or bare iron in the case of Isolates). So it's extremely important for you to understand those components at some point, but from your view as a consumer, you're already using serverless technology.