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.
Lament for the blogs and forums
The treasure trove of obscure information is moving off the open Internet
28 March 2025 Retro Computing
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
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
AWS CodeDeploy, Blue/Green Deployments, and CloudFormation
Subtitled, “Learn from my failures!”
25 January 2019 Cloud Computing
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
