Manuel Acosta — Senior Cloud & Data Engineer specializing in AWS data pipelines, serverless architectures, and cloud cost optimization.

There's a particular kind of pain that every data team eventually hits. A data scientist spends three days hunting for the "right" customer table. An analyst builds a dashboard on a column that was deprecated six months ago. A new hire asks where the revenue data lives, and four people give four different answers. Everyone has the data. Nobody can find it.

This is the problem data catalogs are built to solve, and in 2026, with AI agents now reading from the same warehouses humans do, solving it has gone from "nice to have" to "you cannot ship AI safely without it."

Row-Level Security (RLS) in QuickSight ensures users only access data relevant to their roles, enhancing data confidentiality and compliance. It enables secure, multi-tenant analytics by restricting visibility at the row level. RLS is crucial for delivering personalized insights without compromising sensitive information.

QuickSight is a powerful business intelligence service that helps organizations visualize data, build interactive dashboards, and gain actionable insights. Understanding user roles is essential to maximizing the platform’s capabilities and be aware of costs.

Starting today, I’m committing to sharing my cloud engineering journey every week on Self-Taught Cloud, documenting lessons, deep dives, and hands-on experiences with AWS, Kubernetes, Data and more

AWS has recently introduced several enhancements across its services, aiming to improve data integration, scalability, and security. Here are ten announcements that caught my attention, focusing on integrations and services I already use.