#53 Serverless MCP 🤖
This week, our expert is AWS Senior Solutions Architect Urmila Raju, our spotlight falls on AWS User Group Leader Tom Misiukanis, and we look at the latest service releases, news, articles, & more!
Welcome
In last week’s issue, our serverless expert was AWS Community Builder Ricardo Cino, and our spotlight fell on AWS Community Builder Matt Houghton!
This week, our serverless expert is AWS Senior Solutions Architect Urmila Raju, our spotlight falls on AWS User Group Leader Tom Misiukanis, and we look at the latest AWS service releases, blog posts, hints and tips, news and more!
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Leighton.
🎟️ Tickets are available for the AWS North Community Conference, which I am helping organise, so go check it out!
📰 Articles that caught the eye
Here are some stand-out articles I read during the week in the World of Serverless, AI, Engineering and Architecture!
⭐ My favourite this week was by Matt Martz with a super interesting article on Serverless MCP, with example code repo on GitHub to play with.
Ran Isenberg asked the question “Secrets Manager vs. Parameter Store: Which One Should You Really Use?“.
Vadym Kazulkin discusses “Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime - Part 4 Using Custom Agent with Strands Agents SDK“ in part 4 of his series.
Heeki Park covers “Adding memory to your agentic applications using AgentCore Memory“.
Mathias Verraes discusses “No, Your Domains and Bounded Contexts Don’t Map 1 on 1“.
Ian Brumby covers “Effective Handling of Geospatial Data in DynamoDB“.
Seth Orell has a back to basics article titled “Queues, Buses, and Streams“.
Matthew Martz covers “Serverless MCP: Less than Cake“ in this great article.
The LocalStack team talk about their new integration, “Developing with LocalStack using the AWS Toolkit for VS Code“.
🎓 Ask the Expert
Each week, I ask a different serverless expert the same three questions to get their personal insights - this week, we have AWS Senior Solutions Architect Urmila Raju:
Opinions are the author’s and do not express the views of their employer.
1. What is one common mistake you see teams making when implementing serverless solutions, and how can they avoid it?
Going serverless is super cool and ‘no more servers’, but it’s important to know that it does not mean ‘no more operations’. It’s absolutely critical to plan your DevOps and Observability strategy from Day 1.
Observability: Serverless often is distributed and loosely coupled, and can be event-driven too. When your applications grow to hundreds of components, having visibility into what went wrong and where is critical to keep your production systems up and running.
Further, having end-to-end tracing can help you identify the performance bottlenecks at the right component and take appropriate action. Please take a look at the introduction of one of my previous talks, ‘Observability for Modern Event Driven Applications’, where I have highlighted a practical example of issues that organisations can face, with a lack of observability.
If you are starting today on Serverless observability and do not know what to observe, start with your business metrics, like:
- Banking - ‘Ability to take 5000 transaction requests per second through mobile banking’.
-e-commerce - ‘Ability to process 1000 orders per minute’.
In scenarios like this, observability is the enabler to your design and testing - Example: API throttling limit, how soon a queue can be drained, how fast a SQL query should run etc.DevOps: In Serverless, code is tightly coupled with infrastructure, and hence developers can benefit from having some level of flexibility to build and run their serverless apps. At 1:36 of this talk, I have highlighted the different operational models, focusing on distributed or decentralised DevOps, which can work better for serverless apps. A model where a central team can define guardrails, underlying networking, service control policies (SCP) and IAM roles, whereas independent application teams are enabled to build and run apps, can provide a good balance to build serverless apps at scale. This enables application teams to build and run apps using tools of their choice, like SAM, CDK, etc, while still adhering to the central guardrails of the organisation.
2. Which serverless tool or service are you most excited about right now, and why?
AWS Step Functions is my favourite and continues to be. A low-code and powerful service that can build your business workflows at scale. It has native integration to 220+ AWS services, and API integrations to custom and 3rd party apps.
What excites me right now with Step Functions is the introduction of JSONata and Variables. For beginners, Step Functions’ syntax is a bit of a learning curve, and this has been simplified now with JSONata.
Earlier, you would need a lambda function in the step function workflow for transformations and validations. Now, JSONata helps you to embed it within Step Functions using regular expressions.The next thing is the ability to build AI workflows and embed GenAI within business workflows using Step Functions.
Right now, GenAI and AI-driven transformation have taken organisations by storm. But the success of GenAI is realised when organisations find the right business use case to embed it in. Often, there is a need to embed AI into your existing business workflows – Examples: Intelligent Document Processing and Summarisation, Image Generation and Sentiment Analysis. Step Functions provide you direct integrations to AWS AI services like Textract, Recognition, Comprehend, Sagemaker, Bedrock (and the LLMs within it) and also to 3rd party LLMs through HTTP integrations.
Note: You are welcome to join my upcoming talk at AWS Community Summit (Sep 2025), where I plan to present examples of building AI workflows using Step Functions.
3. What is your favourite trick or tip when working with serverless that the readers may find interesting?
Being a solution architect, building demos, PoCs, and testing various design patterns is part of the job. I would like to highlight tools which helped me accelerate:
AWS Toolkit for Local IDE: Helps developers to author, build, debug, test, and deploy Lambda applications more efficiently in their local IDE when using Visual Studio Code (VS Code). The recent addition to this is the ability to do local development and then cloud deployment of Step Functions from your IDE. With this integration, developers can author and edit state machines in their local IDE using the same powerful visual authoring experience found in the AWS Console.
Model Context Protocol (MCP): In simple terms, MCP servers are tools that AI agents can use to accomplish tasks for you. AWS provides a variety of MCP servers which operate on top of the AWS services. For example, if you are using an AI Interface like Kiro, Q CLI or your own custom app, then you can power it with MCP servers and accomplish a lot of tasks throughout your software development lifecycle. For example, if I ask ‘Compare my AWS Lambda costs between April and May 2025’, then the AWS Cost Explorer MCP Server will provide me the answer with a single prompt.
In the serverless development and deployment world, a few of the MCP servers that can be useful are:
AWS Serverless MCP Server: AI-powered development for modern applicationsAWS Cloud Control API MCP Server: Natural Language Infrastructure Management on AWS
Note: Use these as tools to help you learn and develop serverless, while being conscious of the organisational guardrails, security boundaries and data governance.
✅ Bonus tip: join the hashtag#believeinsls discord! There is a community there to answer any questions you may have without getting overzealous on serverless or without judgment! Check it out!…
🧠 Tips & Tricks
This week’s tip or trick comes from Aman Dhingra on LinkedIn:
🚀 New Releases
Here are the latest and most interesting releases this week in the AWS World:
⭐ This week, my favourite service release was the LocalStack integration with the VS Code ID, and the refactor feature in preview in the AWS CDK!
TwelveLabs’ Marengo Embed 2.7 can now be used for synchronous inference in Amazon Bedrock.
AWS IoT SiteWise now supports retraining of anomaly detection models.
Amazon CloudWatch Observability Access Manager Now Supports VPC Endpoints.
Accelerate serverless testing with LocalStack integration in VS Code IDE.
Amazon ECS enhances task definition editing in the AWS Console with Amazon Q Developer.
Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio supports remote connection from VS Code.
Amazon ECS Service Connect adds support for cross-account workloads.
Amazon RDS Proxy announces support for end-to-end IAM authentication.
Malware Protection for S3 Expands File Size and Archive Scanning Limits.
AWS launches CloudTrail MCP Server for enhanced security analysis.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway supports AWS PrivateLink invocation and invocation logging.
🔥 Tip: Check out https://aws-news.com/ for the very latest up-to-date serverless releases as they happen, created by the talented AWS Serverless Hero Luc van Donkersgoed.
✖️ Social of the Week
This week’s social is by Swami Sivasubramanian on LinkedIn, sharing a fantastic article by Michael Kearns on the latest research on shaping the future of agentic AI:
The article itself covers everything from what language models prefer to communicate in, compares memory and context to that of humans, behavioural economics, and more.
An excerpt from the article that I personally found interesting:
“By similar reasoning, we might also expect the gradual development of an “agentic Web” meant for navigation by AI, in which the text and images on websites are pre-translated into embeddings that are illegible to humans but are massively more efficient than requiring agents to perform these translations themselves with every visit. In the same way that many websites today have options for English, Spanish, Chinese, and many other languages, there would be an option for Agentic.”
What are your thoughts on this post? Feel free to leave a comment below.
👷🏻 Tools & Frameworks
Check out the latest open-source frameworks, news, and tool updates from the past week.
AWS Lambda Execution Visualizer - now showing execution environment shutdowns after being idle.
Spec Kit - An effort to allow organizations to focus on product scenarios rather than writing undifferentiated code with the help of Spec-Driven Development.
Next.js - Next.js 15.5 Ships - Turbopack Production Builds, Node.js Middleware, and Tighter Typescript DX.
Powertools for AWS Lambda - new Lambda updated documentation.
CDK Express Pipeline - CDK Express Pipeline is a library built on the AWS CDK, allowing you to define pipelines in a CDK-native method.
Introducing AWS CDK Refactor - The AWS CDK has introduced a refactor feature in preview, allowing us to more easily split our stacks and rename constructs when needed.
😂 Just for Fun
This week’s post is by Stephane Moreau on LinkedIn:
The silly thing is, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see this kind of thing in the real World!
🎙️ YouTube & Podcasts
Here are some of my favourite videos and podcasts this week covering serverless, AI, architecture, and software engineering.
⭐ My favourite video was by Allen Helton covering how vector indexes work, and when the first sentence is “when you are searching through thousands of photos of your chickens“, you know it’s going to be a good one!
Maxwell Brown and James Ward discuss how to “Build Production-Ready AI Agents with TypeScript Effect & Amazon Bedrock (Complete Tutorial)“.
Dave Farley covers “The Secrets to Being an AWESOME Tech Lead“.
Allen Helton has a great video on ‘How do vector indexes work?‘ on the Momento channel.
ThePrimeTime discusses yet another supply chain attack in this great video titled “it somehow got worse“.
Birgitta Böckeler covers the state of play of ‘AI Assistance for Software Teams‘.
Derek Comartin discusses the old question of ‘Direction of Dependencies Dogma‘.
Ishan and Amanda cover how to “Gain Complete Visibility into AI Agents“ with AgentCode.
Weekly Case Study 🔍
This week’s case study comes from Box:
Box leveraged AWS to optimise cloud spend and improve operational efficiency, achieving over $2.23 million in savings by applying the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The company utilised services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and AWS Lambda to modernise its infrastructure, enhance observability, and align resource usage with demand. This transformation enabled Box to scale more effectively while maintaining cost awareness and performance.
🗣️ Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts
This week’s inspirational quote is by American historian, philosopher, and writer Will Durant:
“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance“
Will Durant
I love this quote personally, as this is very much how I look at learning and personal development, and I actually find this exciting!
Diving into a subject and finding out how much you don’t know is exhilarating! I personally start on a subject or service within AWS, engineering, or architecture, and write it into Notion in my learning list, and then as I learn more key areas of that subject that I don’t know, I add them as bullet points for further learning.
What are your own thoughts and experiences of this quote? Feel free to leave a comment below.
🗳️ Poll of the Week
In last week’s poll, we asked the question “Which are the first roles to be largely affected by AI?”. Interestingly, 83% said Frontend, and 17% backend engineers. I have to agree that 83% of respondents have used AI to generate some pretty fantastic UIs.
This week, we ask the question, “What is the biggest challenge of building agents in production workloads?”.
Feel free to leave a comment below on why you chose your answer and your experiences!
📅 Serverless Events
The following serverless events are upcoming, so mark your calendars.
🎟️ To note, tickets are available for the AWS North Community Conference, which I am helping organise, so go check it out!
Other fantastic events happening soon:
ACD Bay Area - 17th Sept 2025.
ACD Aotearoa - 18th Sept 2025
ACD Poland - 18th Sept 2025
ACD Portugal - 27th Sept 2025
ACD DACH - 7th Oct 2025
ACD Nordics - 10th Oct 2025
AWS North Community Conference - 16th Oct 2025
ServerlessDays Milano - 21st Oct 2025
ServerlessDays Cardiff - 23rd Oct 2025
Serverless Architecture Conference - 20th-22nd Oct 2025
ServerlessDays Sao Paulo - 5th Nov 2025
Do you have any upcoming events that you want to highlight? Message me below!
⭐ Spotlight
This week’s spotlight falls on AWS User Group Leader Tom Misiukanis:
Tom is the AWS User Group Sheffield Leader, an international speaker, Principal Consultant at Steamhaus, and organiser of Serverless Days Manchester (and also involved in AWS Community Summit Manchester), which are always some of the best conference days I look forward to in my calendar each year! Here is a great example of Tom’s work:
Thank you for everything you do for our amazing community, Tom!
Thank you for reading the latest Serverless Advocate Newsletter!
If you want to find out a little more about me, please have a look at:
https://www.serverlessadvocate.com/
See you next time,
Lee
