Serverless ICYMI Q2 2025

Welcome to the 29th edition of the AWS Serverless ICYMI (in case you missed it) quarterly recap. At the end of a quarter, we share the most recent product launches, feature enhancements, blog posts, videos, live streams, and other interesting things that you might have missed!

In case you missed our last ICYMI, check out previous ICYMI posts.

Figure 1: Serverless calendar Q2 2025

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

MCP and agents are the hot topics in generative AI. MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how AI models can, in a secure and structured way, access external tools, data sources, and APIs. Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins and CLI both support MCP.

For a primer on MCP, watch What is MCP? No, Really!

AWS Serverless MCP Server

AWS announced the open-source AWS Serverless Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, now available in the AWS Labs GitHub repository.

Figure 2: AWS Serverless MCP Server giving Lambda guidance

This is a tool that combines AI assistance with serverless expertise to enhance how developers build modern applications. The tool works with popular AI coding assistants like Amazon Q Developer and CLI, Cline, and Cursor. To add the MCP server, add the following code to your MCP client configuration.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "awslabs.aws-serverless-mcp": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "awslabs.aws-serverless-mcp-server@latest"
      ],
      "env": { 
        "AWS_PROFILE": "your-aws-profile",
        "AWS_REGION": "us-east-1",
        "FASTMCP_LOG_LEVEL": "ERROR"
      }
    }
  }
}

The MCP server includes tools for project initialization, building and deployment, observability, and troubleshooting. The tool helps with operational excellence through observability features and provides contextual guidance for infrastructure as code decisions and AWS Lambda-specific best practices. This makes it easier for both new and experienced developers to build serverless applications.

There is also an Amazon ECS MCP Server to containerize and deploy applications to Amazon ECS within minutes. It helps configure all relevant AWS resources, including load balancers, networking, auto-scaling, monitoring, Amazon ECS task definitions, and services.

Amazon Aurora DSQL is now generally available

Figure 3: Amazon Aurora DSQL announcement

Amazon Aurora DSQL is now generally available. DSQL is a serverless, distributed SQL database with active-active high availability and multi-Region strong consistency. It is designed to make scaling and resilience effortless for your applications and offers the fastest distributed SQL reads and writes.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda Hackathon

The AWS Lambda Hackathon ran through June. With a total prize pool of $15,000, more than 3,700 participants competed to build Lambda applications that solve real-world business problems.

Figure 4: AWS Lambda Hackathon

Submissions needed to include a public code repository, a detailed README explaining the Lambda implementation, and a video demonstration. The projects are being judged by AWS experts based on the quality of the idea, architecture and design, and completeness of the solution.

Native support for Avro and Protobuf with Kafka

AWS Lambda now provides native support for Apache Avro and Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) formatted events with Apache Kafka event source mapping (ESM) when using Provisioned Mode.

Figure 5: Kafka processing flow diagram

The support allows you to validate your schema with popular schema registries. This allows you to use and filter the more efficient binary event formats and share data using schema in a centralized and consistent way. The ESM automatically validates incoming events against registered schemas and can deliver data in either the original binary format or as clean JSON, making it easier to build Kafka consumers across multiple programming languages.

Lambda logging changes can reduce Lambda CloudWatch logging costs. Lambda has introduced tiered pricing for CloudWatch logs and support for additional logging destinations, providing developers with more cost-effective logging options and greater flexibility in where they send their Lambda function logs.

Lambda has standardized billing for the INIT phase, providing more predictable and transparent pricing for function initialization costs.

Figure 6: AWS Lambda lifecycle

This improvement is part of an ongoing effort to make serverless pricing more transparent and predictable for customers building production applications.

There is a new guide exploring priming strategies with SnapStart to optimize cold start performance for Java Lambda functions. SnapStart delivers up to 10x faster function startup performance at no extra cost by creating and caching a snapshot of the initialized execution environment.

Figure 7: AWS Lambda SnapStart lifecycle

Learn how to monitor network traffic in Lambda functions to improve security and performance visibility. The post provides strategies for gaining visibility into network behavior. The guidance covers tools, techniques, and best practices for implementing network monitoring that can help identify security threats, performance bottlenecks, and compliance issues.

See how to optimize trace sampling behavior for Lambda functions using AWS X-Ray to improve observability while reducing costs and performance overhead.

Figure 8: AWS X-Ray tracing flow

This post provides guidance on implementing intelligent sampling strategies that provide the visibility needed for troubleshooting and optimization while minimizing overhead.

AWS CodePipeline now supports deploying to Lambda with traffic shifting for easier publishing of Lambda function revisions and traffic-shifting strategies for safer releases.

AWS named a Leader in Forrester Wave

AWS has been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025, achieving the highest ranking in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories. This underscores AWS’s commitment to providing best-in-class innovation and developer experience in serverless application development. The evaluation analyzed key services, including AWS Lambda for serverless compute, AWS Step Functions and Amazon EventBridge for application integration, and AWS Fargate with Amazon ECS for serverless containers.

Amazon ECS

Amazon ECS now allows you to roll back your Amazon ECS service to a previous safe state if a deployment fails. Deployment circuit breaker automatically detects task launch failures while CloudWatch alarms allow you to detect issues that result in degradation in infrastructure.

Amazon ECS is also introducing a new account setting, defaultLogDriverMode. This allows you to define whether tasks in your account use blocking or non-blocking log driver mode by default, when you do not specify or omit it in your applications’ Task Definitions.

Amazon API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway now supports dynamic routing rules for custom domain name. This allows you to route API requests based on HTTP header values, either independently or in combination with URL paths. You can implement sophisticated routing strategies, such as API versioning, A/B testing, and gradual rollouts, without modifying existing API endpoints.

Figure 9: Amazon API Gateway dynamic routes

Learn how to use Amazon API Gateway to power hybrid workloads to more easily connect cloud and on-premises resources. There are practical examples of authentication, authorization, and data transformation patterns that are important for successful hybrid implementations.

AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) now supports custom domain names for private REST APIs feature of API Gateway.

Amazon EventBridge

Learn how to use Amazon EventBridge Pipes to enrich and customize notifications for more flexible and powerful event processing capabilities. The enhanced notification features allow you to create sophisticated event-driven workflows that can transform, filter, and route events based on complex business logic.

The EventBridge connector for Apache Kafka Connect is now generally available. This open-source connector streamlines event integration of Kafka environments with dozens of AWS services and partner integrations without writing custom integration code or running multiple connectors for each target.

EventBridge now supports AWS CodeBuild batch builds as a target. EventBridge Archive and Replay and API destinations connections now supports Customer Managed Keys.

Discover how to simplify private API integrations using EventBridge and AWS Step Functions. This guide covers the architectural patterns and implementation strategies required to build private integrations. The integrations maintain security while providing the flexibility and scalability that modern applications require.

Both Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS now support IPv6 for API requests, enabling you to communicate with SQS and SNS with IPv6, IPv4, or dual stack clients using public endpoints.

This Amazon S3 security guide covers best practices for securing S3 presigned URLs. Presigned URLs are a common pattern in serverless applications for providing temporary access to S3.

Discover how to enhance multi-account activity monitoring using event-driven architectures for better security and compliance across complex AWS environments.

Generative AI

You can more easily use Amazon Q to transform and upgrade Java and .NET applications.

Amazon Q Developer users with AWS Builder IDs can more easily upgrade to the Pro Tier, giving them higher usage limits in their IDEs and on the CLI.

Amazon Q Developer Eclipse IDE plugin is available and an agentic coding experience is now available within JetBrains and Visual Studio.

Amazon Bedrock now offers comprehensive CloudWatch metrics support for Agents.

Powertools for AWS Lambda introduces Bedrock Agents Function utility. This helps to create Lambda functions that can respond to Amazon Bedrock Agent action requests with built-in parameter injection, response formatting, eliminating boilerplate code and accelerating development.

Amazon Bedrock Intelligent Prompt Routing is now generally available. This routes prompts to different foundation models within a model family, helping you optimize for quality of responses and cost.

Prompt caching helps reduce costs by up to 90% and latency by up to 85% by caching frequently used prompts across multiple API calls. Prompt caching is now generally availability on Amazon Bedrock.

Serverless Compute Blog Posts

April

• Enriching and customizing notifications with Amazon EventBridge Pipes
• Streamlining trace sampling behavior for AWS Lambda functions with AWS X-Ray
• AWS Lambda standardizes billing for INIT Phase
• Optimizing cold start performance of AWS Lambda using advanced priming strategies with SnapStart

May

• AWS Lambda introduces tiered pricing for Amazon CloudWatch logs and additional logging destinations
• Monitoring network traffic in AWS Lambda functions
• Securing Amazon S3 presigned URLs for serverless applications
• Powering hybrid workloads with Amazon API Gateway
• Enhancing multi-account activity monitoring with event-driven architectures
• Introducing AWS Serverless MCP Server: AI-powered development for modern applications

June

• Dynamically routing requests with Amazon API Gateway routing rules
• Introducing AWS Lambda native support for Avro and Protobuf formatted Apache Kafka events
• AWS named a Leader in the 2025 Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms

Serverless Office Hours weekly livestream

April

• April 8 – AWS Lambda and .NET Aspire
• April 15 – Building serverless applications in the IDE
• April 22 – Java Profiler Extension for AWS Lambda
• April 29 – Handling billions of AWS Lambda invocations

May

• May 6 – Improve your public speaking using AI
• May 13 – Simplifying serverless networking
• May 20 – 1 billion PHP on AWS Lambda invokes
• May 27 – Cheaper + more flexible AWS Lambda logging

June

• June 3 – Join the AWS Lambda Hackathon! – Kick-off
• June 10 – Join the AWS Lambda Hackathon! – Week 2
• June 17 – Join the AWS Lambda Hackathon! – Week 3
• June 24 – Join the AWS Lambda Hackathon! – Week 4

The Serverless landing page has more information. The Lambda resources page contains case studies, webinars, whitepapers, customer stories, reference architectures, and even more Getting Started tutorials.

You can also follow the Developer Advocacy team members who work on Serverless to see the latest news, follow conversations, and interact with the team.

• Eric Johnson: @edjgeek
• Julian Wood: @julian_wood
• Marcia Villalba: @mavi888uy
• Gunnar Grosch: @GunnarGrosch
• Darko Mesaros: @darko.rup12.net
• James Ward: @jamesward
• Marcelo Palladino: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mfpalladino
• Salih Gueler: @salihgueler
• Romain Jourdan: @rjourdan_net
• Sebastien Stormacq: @sebsto
• Vinicius Senger: @siliconvini

And finally, visit the Serverless Land for all your serverless needs.