AWS Compute Blog

Serverless ICYMI 2025 Q1

Welcome to the 28th 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 what happened in Q4 2024 here.

Serverless calendar Q1 2025

Serverless calendar Q1 2025

AWS Step Functions

The AWS Step Functions team continues to improve developer experience. Workflow Studio is now available within Visual Studio Code (VS Code) through the AWS Toolkit extension.

AWS Step Functions in IDE

AWS Step Functions in IDE

You can now design, test, and deploy your Step Functions workflows without leaving your IDE. The extension provides a drag-and-drop interface with all the familiar Workflow Studio capabilities, making it even easier to build state machines locally.

To get started, install the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and visit the user guide on Workflow Studio integration.

Step Functions private integrations now allows you to integrate applications seamlessly across private networks, on-premises infrastructure, and cloud platforms. Learn more in a blog post and explanation video.

AWS Step Functions private integrations video

AWS Step Functions private integrations video

Step Functions now integrates with 36 more AWS services that support user messaging capabilities. You can orchestrate notifications through HAQM SNS, HAQM SQS, HAQM EventBridge, HAQM Pinpoint, and more, all using the optimized integrations you’re familiar with.

Step Functions has increased the default quota for state machines and activities from 10,000 to 100,000 per AWS account. This tenfold increase means you can create more workflows to automate your business processes without worrying about hitting quota limits.

Distributed Map is expanding capabilities by adding support for JSON Lines (JSONL) format. JSONL, a highly efficient text-based format, stores structured data as individual JSON objects separated by newlines, making it particularly suitable for processing large datasets.

AWS Step Functions Distributed Map

AWS Step Functions Distributed Map

Distributed Map can also process data from a broader range of delimited file formats stored in HAQM S3 and offers new output transformations for greater control over result formatting.

Developer Tools

Serverless Land patterns are now available directly within VS Code.

You no longer need to switch between your IDE and external resources when building serverless architectures. Browse, search, and implement pre-built serverless patterns directly in VS Code.

Example Serverless Pattern

Example Serverless Pattern

AWS Lambda

Learn how AWS Lambda handles billions of invocations.

AWS Lambda asynchronous invocations

AWS Lambda asynchronous invocations

This blog post provides recommendations and insights for implementing highly distributed applications based on the Lambda service team’s experience building its robust asynchronous event processing system. It dives into challenges you might face, solution techniques, and best practices for handling noisy neighbors.

A new video walks through using the enhanced local IDE experience for Lambda developers.

AWS Lambda new IDE experience

AWS Lambda new IDE experience

The VS Code extension for Lambda now supports live tailing of CloudWatch Logs directly in your IDE following on from previous support for Live Tail in the Lambda console. Watch logs in real-time as your functions execute, making debugging and troubleshooting more efficient than ever.

You can now enable Application Performance Monitoring (APM) for Java and .NET runtimes using HAQM CloudWatch Application Signals.

HAQM CloudWatch Application Signals for Java and .NET AWS Lambda runtimes

HAQM CloudWatch Application Signals for Java and .NET AWS Lambda runtimes

This provides deep visibility into your function’s performance, including method-level tracing, memory profiling, and automated anomaly detection.

HAQM Bedrock features

Multi-agent collaboration is now available in Bedrock as a preview, enabling you to create systems where multiple AI agents work together to solve complex problems. Agents can specialize in different domains, share context, and coordinate their actions to achieve goals that would be difficult for a single agent.

RAG evaluation is now generally available. This provides metrics to assess and improve your retrieval augmented generation pipelines. GraphRAG for Bedrock Knowledge Bases is now generally available, allowing you to enhance retrievals with graph-based context.

HAQM Bedrock Flows now supports multi-turn conversations, allowing you to build dynamic AI applications that maintain context across multiple user interactions. Bedrock data automation is now generally available, streamlining the process of preparing, ingesting, and maintaining data for your GenAI applications. Bedrock now offers LLM-as-a-judge capability for model evaluation, providing automated assessment of model outputs without requiring human reviewers. Compare different models or prompt strategies against your specific criteria at scale.

Bedrock’s capabilities are now integrated into the HAQM SageMaker Unified Studio, creating a seamless experience for machine learning practitioners who want to incorporate foundation models into their workflows. Access Bedrock models, fine-tuning, and evaluation directly from SageMaker.

HAQM Nova is a new generation of state-of-the-art foundation models that deliver frontier intelligence and industry leading price-performance. Nova has expanded its tool use and converse API capabilities, making it easier for developers to build AI assistants that can use external tools to complete tasks.

HAQM Bedrock Guardrails image content filters are now generally available. Define and enforce boundaries for your AI applications with controls for both text and image content, ensuring outputs align with your organization’s policies.

Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports using your existing OpenSearch clusters as the vector storage backend. This integration allows you to leverage your investments in OpenSearch while benefiting from the managed RAG capabilities of Bedrock.

New HAQM Bedrock models

  • Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet hybrid reasoning allows you to toggle between standard and extended thinking modes. In standard mode, it functions as an upgraded version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet. While in extended thinking mode, it employs self-reflection to achieve improved results across a wide range of tasks.
  • DeepSeek R1, an advanced model specialized in research and scientific reasoning excels at complex problem-solving tasks and technical content generation.
  • Cohere Embed 3 models are now available in both multilingual and English-specific versions. These embedding models support text and images, providing more accurate representation for multimodal content and improving retrieval augmented generation (RAG) applications.
  • Ray2, Luma AI’s new visual AI model is capable of creating realistic visuals with fluid, natural movement. You can use it for image understanding, 3D scene reconstruction, and visual content generation, opening new possibilities for immersive and visual applications.
  • Bedrock now supports fine-tuning of Meta’s latest Llama 3.2 models. These upgraded models deliver improved performance across reasoning, coding, and multilingual tasks while being more efficient with computational resources.

HAQM Q Developer

HAQM Q Developer is now available as a CLI agent, bringing AI-assisted development to the command line. Get contextual recommendations, generate shell commands, and solve coding problems without leaving your terminal.

HAQM Q CLI

HAQM Q CLI

HAQM Q Developer transformation now supports upgrading Java applications using Maven to Java 21. It offers enhanced code suggestions, refactoring, and optimization recommendations for applications using the latest Java features, like virtual threads and pattern matching.

AWS AppSync

AWS AppSync Events now supports events publishing for WebSocket APIs, enabling real-time publish-subscribe functionality. This feature makes it easier to build applications requiring instant updates, like chat applications, collaborative tools, and real-time dashboards.

AWS AppSync Events

AWS AppSync Events

There are new AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) L2 constructs for AppSync WebSocket APIs. These make it simpler to define and deploy real-time APIs using infrastructure as code. These high-level constructs handle the details of WebSocket connections, authorization, and messaging patterns.

HAQM SNS

HAQM SNS now supports high throughput mode for SNS FIFO topics, with default throughput matching SNS standard topics. When you enable high-throughput mode, SNS FIFO topics will maintain order within message group, while reducing the de-duplication scope to the message-group level.

HAQM EventBridge

HAQM EventBridge now supports direct delivery to targets across AWS accounts, simplifying multi-account architectures. This reduces latency and improves reliability when routing events between accounts in your organization.

HAQM EventBridge cross account

HAQM EventBridge cross account

The EventBridge console now features event source discovery, making it easier to find and visualize available event sources in your AWS environment. This tool helps you identify potential event producers and understand the event schemas they emit.

AWS Amplify

AWS Amplify now offers a TypeScript data client optimized for server-side Lambda functions, providing type-safe access to your data sources. This client reduces code complexity and improves reliability when working with databases and APIs in server environments.

Serverless compute blog posts

January

February

March

Serverless Office Hours weekly livestream

February

March

Still looking for more?

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.

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