Welcome to Manuel Acosta's Tech Blog — real-world AWS and data engineering, written from production experience.

I write about the problems I actually run into: data pipelines with AWS Glue and Step Functions, serverless architectures on Lambda, Amazon QuickSight for embedded analytics, data catalog tooling, and cloud cost optimization. No filler — just the decisions, trade-offs, and code that came out of real projects.

Whether you are a data engineer, cloud architect, or someone trying to make sense of AWS — there is something useful here.

Blog Posts

Data Catalog Core Concepts Explained — With an Honest Look at OpenMetadata

May 2026
Data Catalog Core Concepts Explained — With an Honest Look at OpenMetadata

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."

Amazon QuickSight: Implementing Row-Level Security

March 2025
Amazon QuickSight: Implementing Row-Level Security

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.

About Selftaugth Cloud page

February 2025
About Selftaugth Cloud page

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

Great news on AWS reinvent 2024 event!

December 2024
Great news on AWS reinvent 2024 event!

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.