Are you looking for romantic, scalable and highly available AWS-themed Valentine's Day Cards to send to your tru luv? Well, you're in the right place.
I make these every year, and it's always hands-down my favourite post of the entire year. It also happens to be my 1 shot to be funny in AWS-related content all year, so buckle up!
Compute
Amazon EC2 instance types come in hundreds of configurations with names like c7gn.xlarge, r6i.metal, and x8aedz. They are all very useful but I dread ever having to say them out loud on stage.
EC2 Spot Instances give you up to 90% off On-Demand pricing, but AWS can take them back with just two minutes' warning. Like love, they can be fleeting.
In EC2 security groups , 0.0.0.0/0 means open to the entire internet, which is a rookie error. Closing it down to a single trusted source is the security equivalent of making it Facebook Official.
EC2 key pairs use SSH keys for secure instance access. This means you need the private key to connect, so you shouldn't be sharing this with anyone.
AWS Graviton5 was launched at re:Invent 2025 and is AWS's most powerful and energy-efficient processor.
AWS Trainium3 is custom silicon AWS designed from scratch for AI training. Other times, people use general-purpose chips, but this is much more efficient and it's what your crush deserves for their generative AI workloads.
AWS Trainium2 chips are purpose-built for ML training and cost a lot less than GPUs for the same work.
EC2 Auto Scaling adds and removes compute capacity based on demand so your app never runs out of room to grow, just like your love.
Serverless
Lambda cold starts happen when a function hasn't been called in a while and needs to get set up before it can get to work - like setting up a kitchen before it's time to cook. The first request can be slow, but then it warms up.
Lambda functions have a maximum execution time of 15 minutes and are billed per millisecond.
Lambda Durable Functions can pause and wait for up to a year, and you don't pay a thing while they're waiting.
Amazon API Gateway sits in front of your backend, so every single request has to pass through it for authentication, throttling, and routing before anything reaches your services.
AWS Step Functions orchestrates workflows as state machines. So, "state" is both a workflow stage and an emotional condition, and then "step" is the actual technical term for a transition here.
In Amazon ECS task definitions, the "essential" boolean flag means if that container fails, everything stops.
Amazon EKS is a fully managed Kubernetes service, so AWS runs the control plane and you don't have to.
Databases
Amazon DynamoDB gives you single-digit millisecond response times at any scale, so this really is true love.
Aurora Multi-AZ keeps a replica ready to take over as the primary in under 30 seconds if something goes wrong.
RDS Multi-AZ keeps a standby copy of your database in a different Availability Zone, always in sync, always ready and waiting.
Aurora DSQL is a serverless SQL database that patches, scales, and manages itself, so you can stop babysitting infrastructure and spend your time planning dates.
Neptune is a graph database so data is stored as nodes connected by edges, and edges are literally called "relationships."
ElastiCache keeps your most-accessed data in memory so you get it back in microseconds, without repeat trips to the database.
Valkey is open-source, so this one is not an AWS card, but Madelyn asked for this card last year and it was one of my favourites, so it's back for 2026! Valkey is an in-memory key-value store supported by ElastiCache and MemoryDB, and it's the most permissive open source alternative to Redis.
OpenSearch is a search engine built to find the best match across massive amounts of data, and the top result is always you.
Database Savings Plans give you discounted pricing in exchange for a commitment to consistent usage over a 1 or 3-year term.
Storage
Amazon S3 stores data with 99.999999999% durability. That's eleven nines, which means you're more likely to lose almost anything else before you lose data in S3.
S3 Vectors can handle up to 2 billion vectors per index and uses similarity search to find the "nearest neighbour", which in this case would be your closest match out of billions.
Amazon S3 Glacier is archival storage designed for data you don't really look at, but need to hold on to for years/decades.
AI and Machine Learning
Nova Omni takes text, images, video, and speech as input, so however you talk to it, it gets what you mean.
Amazon Nova Act builds autonomous browser agents that can take real actions from your natural language instructions.
Nova Forge lets you grab a base Nova model and then train it on your own data until it becomes your own custom frontier model.
Bedrock AgentCore is a platform for deploying and running AI agents at scale. It has built-in runtime, tool integration, identity, observability, and other helpful fetures, including persistent memory across conversations and policy controls that keep agents within boundaries.
Strands Agents is an open-source SDK where you invoke an agent by simply calling agent("your message") - the DX is slick!
Strands Agents lets you build production-ready AI agents in just a few lines of Python.
Networking and Content Delivery
CloudFront caches your content at 600+ edge locations around the world, so wherever your users are, it's already there waiting.
A VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is your own isolated network inside AWS, so it's where your resources live. Every account comes with a default one per region, and deleting it is a classic "you don't know what you've got till it's gone" moment.
Security, Identity, and Compliance
Kind of controversial, but you're supposed to say AWS IAM like eye-am, even though I still spell out I-A-M. Regardless of how you say it, it controls who can do what in your AWS account.
In IAM policies, the wildcard * means "access to everything", and you're really not supposed to use it, but I can see why people would want to make an exception for their tru luv.
Amazon GuardDuty uses ML and threat intelligence to spot suspicious activity in your AWS environment, usually before you even know something's wrong.
AWS WAF blocks bad traffic before it reaches your app. Things like SQL injection, XSS, bots, etc.
AWS KMS manages the encryption keys behind almost everything protected in AWS. Things like S3 objects, EBS volumes, or databases. Without it, your secrets are out in the open.
Management and Governance
CloudWatch monitors your AWS resources around the clock and pings you when something's off. It's probably a red flag if this is happening in your actual relationship.
AWS CloudTrail logs every single API call in your AWS account. So it knows who did what, when, and from where. It remembers everything, and it never judges.
CloudFormation rolls back failed deployments to the last working state. So, when something breaks, it takes you back to when things were good.
Messaging
Amazon SNS topics can have many subscribers, but filter policies let you route specific messages to specific recipients, so even with a crowd wanting to listen, only one person gets your message.
Developer Favourites
AWS Certifications were really instrumental in growing my AWS knowledge, and my AWS Career alongside this. I wish this cert was real.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework defines six pillars of cloud best practices. Calling someone "Well-Architected" is the highest engineering compliment, but probably don't say this to someone who is super new to the cloud.
Amplify handles the backend complexity of full-stack apps, with absolutely lush developer experience. It gives you auth, APIs, storage, and hosting, so it looks easy even when it's doing a lot.
Terraform has a notoriously steep learning curve and breaking changes between major versions, but like true love, it can be worth it.
Rust also has a famously steep learning curve thanks to its borrow checker, but AWS uses it extensively and provides an official SDK.
Last but not least, Kiro is my favourite agentic IDE, and it's the thing I have open on my computer at work the most! Also, it launched during my literal actual wedding ceremony, so that has to be a sign.
Wrap Up
That's all 50! Now go send one to your favourite person, or your favourite service, I won't judge.
If you've got ideas for cards I missed, drop them in the comments - I'm always looking for more. Happy Valentine's Day!
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