Richard Downer.

Software Engineer turned Cloud Architect and Devops.
Specialising in AWS and FinOps.
Commodore Amiga and other retro 80s/90s computers.
Amateur electronics, hardware and fumbling with FPGAs.

Personal website, projects and blog.

RPi1200 HAT

A Rasperry Pi HAT for Amiga 1200 cases, LEDs and accessories

23 May 2023

Minecraft for Children

Minecraft can be a fun game for young children, but not when there’s monsters in the dark. Here’s how to set up Minecraft games just for fun and creativity, without the scary stuff.

9 November 2022 Misc

Minecraft for Children
Memory in the MS-DOS era

MS-DOS memory management always was confusing for teenage me. But with the hindsight of a couple of decades, it’s actually not as difficult to understand as I first thought.

10 July 2020 Retro Computing

Memory in the MS-DOS era
AWS CodeDeploy, Blue/Green Deployments, and CloudFormation

Subtitled, “Learn from my failures!”

25 January 2019 Cloud Computing

AWS CodeDeploy, Blue/Green Deployments, and CloudFormation
Understanding collectd and rrdtool

I recently had reason to collect metrics on a Linux server that was to be posted to an analysis service. My requirements were to collect minimum, maximum and average measurements of several key …

27 October 2017 Misc

At work

In addition to my own site, I sometimes write posts for Cloudsoft, my employer. Here are some of the articles I've written for their blog:

Apache Brooklyn 1.0 has taken a long journey since its inception, and many people have been involved over that time. Read more

AWS recently announced a new instance class, T3. These are cost-effective instances which offer great price/performance for workloads that use moderate CPU, with the option to burst to high CPU usage whenever needed. Read more