Do I need to have a configuration set to get Amazon SES bounce details?

No, configuration sets (for Amazon SES event publishing) aren't the only way to get details about bounces on Amazon SES. You can set up bounce notifications in one of these ways:

• You can send bounce notifications to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Because Amazon SNS notifications use the JSON format, you can process the notifications programmatically.
• You can use email feedback forwarding, which is enabled by default. If you previously disabled email feedback forwarding, you can re-enable the feature using the Amazon SES console.