Podcasts Technology Screaming in the Cloud Using DevOps to Ignite a Chain Reaction of Productivity and Happiness with Dave Mangot

Using DevOps to Ignite a Chain Reaction of Productivity and Happiness with Dave Mangot

Published: Dec. 14, 2023, 11 a.m.

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Dave Mangot, CEO and founder of Mangoteque, joins Coreyon Screaming in the Cloud to explain how leveraging DevOps improves the lives of engineers and results in stronger businesses. Dave talks about the importance of exclusively working for private equity firms that act ethically, the key difference between venture capital and private equity, and how conveying issues and ideas to your CEO using language he understands leads to faster results. Corey and Dave discuss why successful business are built on two things: infrastructure as code and monitoring.


About Dave

Dave Mangot, author of DevOps Patterns for Private Equity, helps portfolio companies get good at delivering software.\\xa0 He is a leading consultant, author, and speaker as the principal at Mangoteque.\\xa0 A DevOps veteran, Dave has successfully led digital, SRE, and DevOps transformations at companies such as Salesforce, SolarWinds, and Cable & Wireless. He has a proven track record of working with companies to quickly mature their existing culture to improve the speed, frequency, and resilience of their software service delivery.

Links Referenced:


Transcript

Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.


Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I\\u2019m Corey Quinn. My guest today is someone that I have known for, well, longer than I\\u2019ve been doing this show. Dave Mangot is the founder and CEO at Mangoteque. Dave, thank you for joining me.


Dave: Hey, Corey, it\\u2019s great to be here. Nice to see you again.


Corey: I have to say, your last name is Mangot and the name of your company is Mangoteque, spelled M-A-N-G-O-T-E-Q-U-E, if I got that correctly, which apparently I did. What an amazing name for a company. How on earth did you name a company so well?


Dave: Yeah, I don\\u2019t know. I have to think back, a few years ago, I was just getting started in consulting, and I was talking to some friends of mine who were giving me a bunch of advice\\u2014because they had been doing consulting for quite some time\\u2014about what my rates should be, about all kinds of\\u2014you know, which vendors I should work with for my legal advice. And I said, \\u201cI\\u2019m having a lot of trouble coming up with a name for the company.\\u201d And this guy, Corey Quinn, was like, \\u201cHey, I got a name for you.\\u201d [laugh].


Corey: I like that story, just because it really goes to show the fine friends of mine over at all of the large cloud services companies\\u2014but mostly AWS\\u2014that it\\u2019s not that hard to name something well. The trick, I think, is just not to do it in committee.


Dave: Yeah. And you know, it was a very small committee obviously of, like, three. But yeah, it\\u2019s been great. I have a lot of compliments on the name of my company. And I was like, oh, \\u201cYou know that guy, the QuinnyPig dude?\\u201d And they\\u2019re like, \\u201cYeah?\\u201d \\u201cOh, yeah, it was\\u2014that was his idea.\\u201d And I liked it. And it works really well for the things that I do.


Corey: It seems to. So, talk to you about what it is that you do because back when we first met and many, many years ago, you were an SRE manager at a now defunct observability company. This was so long ago, I don\\u2019t think that they used the term observability. It was Librato, which, \\u201cWhat do you do?\\u201d \\u201cWe do monitoring,\\u201d back when that didn\\u2019t sound like some old-timey thing. Like, \\u201cOh, yeah. Right, between the blacksmith and the cobbler.\\u201d But you\\u2019ve evolved significantly since you were doing the mundane, pedestrian tasks of keeping the service up and running. What do you do these days?


Dave: Yeah, that was before the observability wars [laugh] [whatever you like 00:02:55] to call it. But over time, that company was owned by SolarWinds and I wound up being responsible for all the SolarWinds cloud company SRE organizations. So, started\\u2014ran a global organization there. And they were owned by a couple of private equity firms. And I got to know one of the firms rather well, and then when I left SolarWinds, I started working with private equity firm portfolio companies, especially software investments. And what I like to say is I teach people how to get good at delivering software.


Corey: So, you recently wrote a book, and I know this because I make it a point to get a copy of the book\\u2014usually by buying it, but you beat me to it by gifting me one\\u2014of every guest I have on the show who\\u2019s written a book. Sometimes that means I wind up with the eclectic collections of poetry, other times, I wind up with a number of different books around the DevOps and cloud space. And one of these days, I\\u2019m going to wind up talking to someone who wound up writing an encyclopedia or something, to where I have to back the truck around. But what I wanted to ask is about your title, of all things. It\\u2019s called DevOps Patterns for Private Equity. And I have to ask, what makes private equity special?


Dave: I think as a cloud economist, what you also just told me, is you owe me $17.99 for the book because it was gifted.


Corey: Is that how expensive books are these days? My God, I was under the impression once you put the word \\u2018DevOps\\u2019 in the title, that meant you\\u2019re above 40 bucks, just as, you know, entrance starting fees here.


Dave: I think I need to talk to my local cloud economist on how to price things. Yeah, the book is about things that I\\u2019ve basically seen at portfolio companies over the years. The thing about, you know, why private equity, I think it would be one question, just because I\\u2019ve been involved in the DevOps movement since pretty much the start, when John Willis calls me a DevOps OG, which I think is a compliment. But the thing that I like about working with private equity, and more specifically, private equity portfolio companies is, like I wrote in the book, they\\u2019re serious. And serious means that they\\u2019re not afraid to make a big investment, they\\u2019re not afraid to change things quickly, they\\u2019re not afraid to reorganize, or rethink, or whatever because a lot of these private equity firms have, how they describe it as a three to five year investment thesis. So, in three to five years, they want to have some kind of an exit event, which means that they can\\u2019t just sit around and talk about things and try it and see what happens\\u2014


Corey: In the fullness of time, 20 years from now. Yeah, it doesn\\u2019t work that well. But let\\u2019s back up a little bit here because something that I have noticed over the years is that, especially when it comes to financial institutions, the general level of knowledge is not terrific. For a time, a lot of people were very angry at Goldman Sachs, for example. But okay, fair enough. What does Goldman Sachs do? And the answer was generally incoherent.


And again, I am in no way, shape or form, different from people who form angry opinions without having all of the facts. I do that myself three times before breakfast. My last startup was acquired by BlackRock, and I was the one that raised our hand internally, at the 40-person company when that was announced, as everyone was sort of sitting there stunned: \\u201cWhat\\u2019s a BlackRock?\\u201d Because I had no idea. Well, for the next nine months, I assure you, I found out what a BlackRock is. But what is private equity? Because I see a lot of them getting beaten up for destroying companies. Everyone wants to bring up the Toys-R-Us story as a for instance. But I don\\u2019t get the sense that that is the full picture. Tell me more.


Dave: Yes. So, I\\u2019m probably not the best spokesperson for private equity. But\\u2014


Corey: Because you don\\u2019t work for a private equity firm, you only work with them, that makes you a terrific spokesperson because you\\u2019re not [in 00:06:53] this position of, \\u201cWell, justify what your company does here,\\u201d situation, there\\u2019s something to be said for objectivity.


Dave: So, you know, like I wrote in the book, there are approximately 10,000 private equity firms in the United States. They are not all going to be ethical. That is just not a thing. I choose to work with a specific segment of private equity companies, and these private equity companies want to make a good business. That\\u2019s what they\\u2019re going for.


And you and I, having had worked at many companies in our careers, know that there\\u2019s a lot of companies out there that aren\\u2019t a good business. You\\u2019re like, \\u201cWhy are we doing this? This doesn\\u2019t make any sense. This isn\\u2019t a good investment. This\\u201d\\u2014there\\u2019s a lot of things and what I would call the professional level private equity firms, the ones at the top\\u2014and not all of them at the top are ethical, don\\u2019t get me wrong; I have a blacklist here of companies I won\\u2019t work for. I will not say who those companies are.


Corey: I am in the same boat. I think that anyone who works in an industry at all and doesn\\u2019t have a list of companies that they would not do business with, is, on some level, either haven\\u2019t thought it through, hasn\\u2019t been in business long enough, or frankly, as long as you\\u2019re paying them, everything you can do is a-okay. And you know, I\\u2019m not going to sit here and say that those are terrible people, but I never wanted to do that soul-searching. I always thought the only way to really figure out where you stand is to figure it out in advance before there\\u2019s money on the table. Like, do you want to go do contracting for a defense company? Well no, objectively, I don\\u2019t, but that\\u2019s a lot harder to say when they\\u2019re sitting on the table with $20 million in front of you of, \\u201cDo you want to work with a defense company?\\u201d Because you can rationalize your way into anything when the stakes are high enough. That\\u2019s where I\\u2019ve always stood on it. But please, continue.


Dave: I\\u2019d love to be in that situation to turn down $20 million [laugh].


Corey: Yeah, that\\u2019s a hard situation to find yourself in, right?


Dave: But regardless, there\\u2019s a lot of different kinds of private equity firms. Generally the firms that I work with, they all want\\u2014not generally; the ones I work with want to make better companies. I have had operating partners at these companies tell me\\u2014because this always comes up with private equity\\u2014there\\u2019s no way to cut your way to a good company. So, the private equity firms that I work with invest in these companies. Do they sell off unprofitable things? Of course they do. Do they try to streamline some things sometimes so that the company is only focused on X or Y, and then they tuck other companies into it\\u2014that\\u2019s called a buy and build strategy or a platform strategy\\u2014yes. But the purpose of that is to make a better company.


The thing that I see a lot of people in our industry\\u2014meaning, like, us tech kind of folks\\u2014get confused about is what the difference is between venture capital and private equity. And private equity, in general, is the thing that is the kind of financing that follows on after venture capital. So, in venture capital, you are trying to find product-market fit. The venture capitalists are putting all their bets down like they\\u2019re in Vegas at re:Invent, and trying to figure out which bet is going to pay off, but they have no expectation that all of the bets are going to pay off. With private equity, the companies have product-market fit, they\\u2019re profitable. If they\\u2019re not profitable, they have a very clear line to profitability.


And so, what these private equity firms are trying to do, no matter what the size of the company is, whether it\\u2019s a 50-person company or a 5000-person company, they\\u2019re trying to get these companies up to another level so that they\\u2019re more profitable and more valuable, so that either a larger fish will gobble them up or they\\u2019ll go out on the public markets, like onto the stock market, those kinds of things, but they\\u2019re trying to make a company that\\u2019s more valuable. And so, not everything looks so good [laugh] when you\\u2019re looking at it from the outside, not understanding what these people are trying to do. That\\u2019s not to say they\\u2019re not complete jerks who are in private equity because there are.


Corey: Because some parts are missing. Kidding. Kidding. Kidding.


Dave: [laugh].


Corey: It\\u2019s a nuanced area, and it\\u2019s complicated, just from the perspective of\\u2026 finance is deceptively complicated. It looks simple, on some level, because on some level, you can always participate in finance. I have $10. I want to buy a thing that costs $7. How does that work? But it gets geometrically more complex the further you go. Financial engineering is very much a thing.


And it is not at all obvious how those things interplay with different dynamics. One of the private equity outcomes, as you alluded to a few minutes ago, is the idea that they need to be able to rapidly effect change. It becomes a fast turnaround situation, and then have an exit event of some kind. So, the DevOps patterns that you write about are aligned with an idea of being effective, presumably, rather than, well, here\\u2019s how you slowly introduce a sweeping cultural mindset shift across the organization. Like, that\\u2019s great, but some of us don\\u2019t have that kind of runway for what we\\u2019re trying to achieve to be able to pull that off. So, I\\u2019m assuming that a lot of the patterns you talk about are emphasizing rapid results.


Dave: Well, I think the best way to describe this, right, is what we\\u2019ve talked about is they want to make a better company. And for those of us who have worked in the DevOps movement for all these years, what\\u2019s one great way of making a better company? Adopting DevOps principles, right? And so, for me, one of the things I love about my job is I get to go in and make engineers\\u2019 lives better. No more working on weekends, no more we\\u2019re only going to do deployments at 11 o\\u2019clock at night, no more we\\u2019re going to batch things up and ship them three or four times a year, which all of us who\\u2019ve done DevOps stuff for years know, like, fastest way to have a catastrophe is batch up as many things as possible and release them all at once.


So like, for me, I\\u2019m going in making engineers\\u2019 lives better. When their lives are better, they produce better results because they\\u2019re not stressed out, they\\u2019re not burned out, they get to spend time with their families, all those kinds of things. When they start producing better results, the executives are happier. The executives can go to the investors and show all the great results they\\u2019re getting, so the investors are happier. So, for me, I always say, like, I\\u2019m super lucky because I have a job that\\u2019s win, win, win.


And like, I\\u2019m helping them to make a better company, I\\u2019m helping them to ship faster, I\\u2019m helping them do things in the cloud, I\\u2019m helping them get more reliability, which helps them retain customers, all these things. Because we know from the\\u2014you know, remember the 2019 State of DevOps Report: highest performers are twice as likely to meet or exceed their organization\\u2019s performance goals, and those can be customer retention, revenue, whatever those goals are. And so, I get to go in and help make a better company because I\\u2019m making people\\u2019s lives better and, kind of, everybody wins. And so, for me, it\\u2019s super rewarding.


Corey: That\\u2019s a good way of framing it. I have to ask, since the goal for private equity, as you said, is to create better companies, to effectively fix a bunch of things that, for better or worse, had not been working optimally. Let me ask the big, dumb, naive question here. Isn\\u2019t that ostensibly the goal of every company? Now, everyone says it\\u2019s their goal, but whether that is their goal or not, I think, is a somewhat separate question.


Dave: Yeah. I\\u2014that should be the goal of every company, I agree. There are people who read my book and said, \\u201cHey, this stuff applies far beyond private equity.\\u201d And I say, \\u201cYeah, it absolutely does.\\u201d But there are constraints\\u2014[gold rat 00:15:10]\\u2014within private equity, about the timing, about the funding, about whatever, to get the thing to another level. And that\\u2019s an interesting thing that I\\u2019ve seen is I\\u2019ve seen private equity companies take a company up to another level, have some kind of exit event, and then buy that company again years later. Which, like, what? Like, how could that be?


Corey: I\\u2019ve seen that myself. It feels, on some level, like that company goes public, and then goes private, then goes public, then goes private to the same PE firm, and it\\u2019s like, are you really a PE company or are you just secretly a giant cat, perpetually on the wrong side of a door somewhere?


Dave: But that\\u2019s because they will take it to a level, the company does things, things happen out in the market, and then they see another opportunity to grow them again. Where in a regular company\\u2014in theory\\u2014you\\u2019re going to want to just get better all the time, forever. This is the Toyota thesis about continual improvement.


Corey: I am curious as far as what you are seeing changing in the market with the current macroeconomic conditions, which is a polite way to say the industry going wonky after ten years of being relatively up and to the right.


Dave: Yeah, well, I guess the fun thing is, we have interest rates, we had a pandemic, we had [laugh], like, all this exciting stuff. There\\u2019s, you know, massive layoffs, [unintelligible 00:16:34] and then all this, kind of like, super churn-y things. I think the fun thing for me is, I went to a private equity conference in San Francisco, I don\\u2019t know, a month ago or something like that, and they had all these panelists on stage pontificating about this and that and the other thing, and one of the women said something that I thought was really great, especially for someone like me. She said, \\u201cThe next five to ten years in private equity are going to be about growth and operational efficiency.\\u201d And I was like, \\u201cThat\\u2019s DevOps. That\\u2019s awesome.\\u201d [laugh].


That really works well for me because, like, we want to have people twice as likely to meet or exceed their organization\\u2019s performance goals. That\\u2019s growth. And we want operational efficiency, right? Like, stop manually copying files around, start putting stuff in containers, do all these things that enable us to go fast speed and also do that with high quality. So, if the next five to ten years are going to be about growth and operational efficiency, I think it\\u2019s a great opportunity for people to take in a lot of these DevOps principles.


And so, the being on the Screaming in the Cloud podcast, like, I think cloud is a huge part of that. I think that\\u2019s a big way to get growth and operational efficiency. Like, how better to be able to scale? How better to be able to Deming\\u2019s PDSA cycle, right\\u2014Plan, Do, Study, Act\\u2014how better to run all these experiments to find out, like, how to get better, how to be more efficient, how to meet our customers\\u2019 demands. I think that\\u2019s a huge part of it.


Corey: That is, I think, a very common sentiment as far as how folks are looking at things from a bigger picture these days. I want to go back as well to something you said earlier that I was joking around at the start of the episode about, \\u201cWow, what an amazing name for the company. How did you come up with it?\\u201d And you mentioned that you had been asking a bunch of people for advice\\u2014or rather, you mentioned you had gotten advice from people. I want to clarify, you were in fact asking. I wasn\\u2019t basically the human form of Clippy popping up, \\u201cIt looks like you\\u2019re starting a business. Let me give you unsolicited advice on what you should be doing.\\u201d


What you\\u2019ve done, I think, is a terrific example of the do what I say not what I do type of problem, where you have focused on your positioning on a specific segment of the market: private equity firms and their portfolio companies. If I had been a little bit smarter, I would have done something similar in my own business. I would fix AWS bills for insurance companies in the Pacific Northwest or something like that, where people can hear the type of company they are reflected in the name of what it is that you do. I was just fortunate enough or foolish enough to be noisy enough in order to talk about what I do in a way that I was able to overcome that. But targeting the way that you have, I think is just so spot on. And it\\u2019s clearly working out for you.


Dave: I think a Corey Quinn Clippy would be very distracting in [laugh] my Microsoft Word, first of all [laugh]. Second of all\\u2014


Corey: They\\u2019re calling it Copilot now.


Dave: [laugh]\\u2014there\\u2019s this guy Corey and his partner Mike who turned me on to this guy, Jonathan Stark, who has his theory about your business. He calls it, like, elucidating, like, a Rolodex moment. So, if somebody\\u2019s talking about X or Y, and they say, \\u201cOh, yeah. You want to talk to Corey about that.\\u201d Or, \\u201cYou want to talk to Mike about that.\\u201d


And so, for me, working with private equity portfolio companies, that\\u2019s a Rolodex moment. When people are like, \\u201cI\\u2019m at a portfolio company. We just got bought. They\\u2019re coming in, and they want to understand what our spend is on the cloud, and this and that. Like, I don\\u2019t know what I\\u2019m supposed to do here.\\u201d A lot of times people think of me because I tend to work on those kinds of problems. And so, it doesn\\u2019t mean I can\\u2019t work on other things, and I definitely do work on other things, I\\u2019ve definitely worked with companies that are not owned by private equity, but for me, that\\u2019s really a place that I enjoy working, and thankfully, I get Rolodex moments from those things.


Corey: That\\u2019s the real value that I\\u2019ve found. The line I\\u2019ve heard is always it\\u2019s not just someone at a party popping up and saying, \\u201cOh, yeah, I have that problem.\\u201d But, \\u201cOh, my God, you need to talk to this person I know who has that problem.\\u201d It\\u2019s the introduction moment. In my case at least, it became very hard for me to find people self-identifying as having large AWS bills, just because, yeah, individual learners or small startup founders, for example, might talk about it here and there, but large companies do not tend to complain about that in Twitter because that tends to, you know, get them removed from their roles when they start going down that path. Do you find that it is easier for you to target what you do to people because it\\u2019s easier to identify them in public? Because I assure you, someone with a big AWS bill is hard to spot out of a crowd.


Dave: Well, I think you need to meet people where they are, I think is probably the best way of saying that. So, if you are\\u2014and this isn\\u2019t something I need to explain to you, obviously, so this is more for your listeners, but like, if you\\u2019re going to talk about, \\u201cHey, I\\u2019m looking for companies with large AWS bills,\\u201d [pthhh] like that\\u2019s, maybe kind of whatever. But if you say, \\u201cHey, I want to improve your margins and your operational efficiencies,\\u201d all of a sudden, you\\u2019re starting to speak their language, right? And that language is where people start to understand that, \\u201cHey, Corey\\u2019s talking about me.\\u201d


Corey: A large part of how I talk about this was shaped by some of the early conversations I had. The way that I think about this stuff and the way that I talk is not necessarily what terms my customers use. Something that I found that absolutely changed my approach was having an investigative journalist\\u2014or a former investigative journalist, in this case\\u2014interview people I\\u2019d worked with to get case studies and testimonials from them. But what she would also do was get the exact phrasing that they use to describe the value that I did, and how they talked about what we\\u2019d done. Because that became something that was oh, you\\u2019re effectively writing the rough draft of my marketing copy when you do that. Speaking in the language of your customer is so important, and I meet a lot of early-stage startups that haven\\u2019t quite unlocked that bit of insight yet.


Dave: And I think looking at that from a slightly different perspective is also super important. So, not only speaking the language of your customer, but let\\u2019s say you\\u2019re not a consultant like me or you. Let\\u2019s say you work inside of a company. You need to learn to speak the language of business, right? And this is, like, something I wrote about in the beginning of the book about the guy in San Francisco who got locked up for not giving away the Cisco passwords, and Gavin Newsom had to go to his jail cell and all this other crazy stuff that happened is, technologists often think that the reason that they go to work is to play with technology. The reason we go to work is to enable the business.


And\\u2014so shameless plug here I\\u2014wrote a paper that came out, like, two months ago with IT Revolution\\u2014so the people who do The Phoenix Project, and Accelerate, and The DevOps Handbook, and all that other stuff, I wrote this paper with, like, Courtney Kissler, and Paul Gaffney, and Scott Nasello, and a whole bunch of amazing technologists, but it\\u2019s about speaking the language of business. And as technologists, if we want to really contribute and feel like the work that we\\u2019re doing is contributing and valuable, you need to start understanding how those other people are talking. So, you and I were just talking about, like, operational efficiencies, and margins, and whatever. What is all that stuff? And figuring that out and being able to have that conversation with your CEO or whoever, those are the things that get people to understand exactly what you\\u2019re trying to do, and what you\\u2019re doing, and why this thing is so important.


I talk to so many engineers that are like, \\u201cAh, I talked to management and they just don\\u2019t understand, and [da-dah].\\u201d Yeah, they don\\u2019t understand because you\\u2019re speaking technology language. They don\\u2019t want to hear about, like, CNCF compliant this, that, and the\\u2014that doesn\\u2019t mean anything to them. You need to understand in their lang\\u2014talk to them and their language and say like, \\u201cHey, this is why this is good for the business.\\u201d And I think that\\u2019s a really important thing for people to start to learn.


Corey: So, a question that I have, given that you have been doing this stuff, I think, longer than I have, back when cloud wasn\\u2019t really a thing, and then it was a thing, but it seemed really irresponsible to do. And then it went through several more iterations to the point where now it\\u2019s everywhere. What\\u2019s your philosophy of cloud?


Dave: So, I\\u2019ll go back to something that just came out, the 2023 State of DevOps Report just came out. I follow those things pretty closely. One of the things they talked about in the paper is one of the key differentiators to get your business to have what they call high organizational performance\\u2014again, this [laugh] is going back to business talk again\\u2014is what they call infrastructure flexibility. And I just don\\u2019t think you can get infrastructure flexibility if you\\u2019re not in the cloud. Can you do it? Absolutely.


You know, back over a decade ago, I built out a bunch of stuff in a data center on what I called cloud principles. We could shoot things in the head, get new ones back, we did all kinds of things, we identified SKUs of, like, what kind of classes of machines we had. All that looks like a lot of stuff that you would just do in AWS, right? Like, I know, my C instances are compute. I know my M instances are memory. Like, they\\u2019re all just SKUs, right?


Corey: Yeah, that changed a little bit now to the point where they have so many different instance families that some of their names look like dumps of their firmware.


Dave: [laugh]. That is probably true. But like, this idea that, like, I want to have this infrastructure flexibility isn\\u2019t just my idea that it\\u2019s going to turn out well. Like, the State of DevOps Report kind of proves it. And so, for me, like, I go back to some of the principles of the DevOps movement, and like, if you look at the DORA metrics, let\\u2019s say you\\u2019ve got deployment frequency and lead time for changes. That\\u2019s speed: how fast can I do something? And you\\u2019ve got time-to-recover, and you\\u2019ve got change failure rate. That\\u2019s quality: how much can I ship without having problems, and how fast can I recover when I do?


And I think this is one of the things I teach to a lot of my clients about moving into the cloud. If you want to be successful, you have to deliver with speed and quality. Speed: Infrastructure as Code, full stop. If I want to be able to go fast, I need to be able to destroy an environment, bring a new environment up, I need to be able to do that in minutes. That\\u2019s speed.


And then the second requirement, and the only other requirement, is build monitoring in from the start. Everything gets monitored. And that\\u2019s quality. Like, if I monitor stuff, I know when I\\u2019ve deployed something that\\u2019s spiking CPU. If that\\u2019s monitored, I know that this thing is costing me a hell of a lot more than other things. I know all this stuff. And I can do capacity planning, I can do whatever the heck I want. But those are the two fundamental things: Infrastructure as Code and monitoring.


And yes, like you said, I worked at a monitoring or observability company, so perhaps I\\u2019m slightly biased, but what I\\u2019ve seen is, like, companies that adopt those two principles, and everything else comes from that\\u2014so all my Kubernetes stuff and all those other things are not at odds with those principles\\u2014those are the people who actually wind up doing really well. And I think those are the people that have\\u2014State of DevOps Report\\u2014infrastructure flexibility, and that enables them to have higher organizational performance.


Corey: I think you\\u2019re onto something. Like, I still remember the days of having to figure out the number of people who you had in your ops team versus how many servers they could safely and reasonably run. And now that question has little, if any, meaning. If someone asked me, \\u201cOkay, so we\\u2019re running right now 10,000 instances in our cloud environment. How many admins should it take us to run those?\\u201d The correct response is, \\u201cHow the heck are you running those things?\\u201d Like, tell me more because the answer is probably terrifying. Because right now, if you do that correctly, it\\u2019s you want to make a change to all of them or some subset of them? You change a parameter somewhere and computers do the heavy lifting.


Dave: Yeah, I ran a content delivery network for cable and wireless. We had three types of machines. You know, it was like Windows Media Server and some squid-cache thing or whatever. And it didn\\u2019t matter how many we had. It\\u2019s all the same. Like, if I had 10,000 and I had 50,000, it\\u2019s irrelevant. Like, they\\u2019re all the same kind of crap. It\\u2019s not that hard to manage a bunch of stuff that\\u2019s all the same.


If I have 10,000 servers and each one is a unique, special snowflake because I\\u2019m running in what I call a hosted configuration, I have 10,000 customers, therefore I have 10,000 servers, and each of them is completely different than the other, then that\\u2019s going to be a hell of a lot harder to manage than 10,000 things that the load balancer is like [bbbrrrp bbbrrrp] [laugh] like, just lay it out. So, it\\u2019s sort of a\\u2026 kind of a nonsense question at this point. Like you\\u2019re saying, like, it doesn\\u2019t really matter how many. It\\u2019s complexity. How much complexity do I have? And as we all say, in the DevOps movement, complexity isn\\u2019t free. Which I\\u2019ll bet is a large component of how you save companies money with The Duckbill Group.


Corey: It goes even beyond that because cloud infrastructure is always less expensive than the people working on it, unless you do something terrifying. Otherwise, everything should be running an EC2 instances. Nothing higher-level built on top of it because if people\\u2019s time is free, the cheapest thing you\\u2019re going to get is a bunch of instances. The end. That is not really how you should be thinking about this.


Dave: [laugh]. I know a lot of private equity firms that would love to find a place where time was free [laugh]. They could make a lot of money.


Corey: Yeah. Pretty sure that the biggest\\u2014like, \\u201cWhat\\u2019s your biggest competitive headwind?\\u201d You know [laugh], \\u201cWage laws.\\u201d Like it doesn\\u2019t work that way. I\\u2019m sorry, but it doesn\\u2019t [laugh].


I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me about what you\\u2019re up to, how things are going over in your part of the universe. If people want to learn more, where\\u2019s the best place for them to go to find you?


Dave: They can go to mangoteque.com. I\\u2019ve got all the links to my blog, my mailing list. Definitely, if you\\u2019re interested in this intersection of DevOps and private equity, sign up for the mailing list. For people who didn\\u2019t get Corey\\u2019s funky spelling of my last name, it is a play on the fact that it is French and I also work with technology companies. So, it\\u2019s M-A-N-G-O-T-E-Q-U-E dot com.


If you type that in\\u2014Mangoteque\\u2014to any search engine, obviously, you will find me. I am not difficult to find on the internet because I\\u2019ve been doing this for quite some time. But thank you for having me on the show. It\\u2019s always great to catch up with you. I love hearing about what you\\u2019re doing. I super appreciate you\\u2019re asking me about the things that I\\u2019m working on, and you know, been a big help.


Corey: No, it\\u2019s deeply fascinating. It\\u2019s neat to watch you continue to meet your market in a variety of different ways. Dave Mangot, CEO and founder of Mangoteque, which is excellently named. I\\u2019m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you\\u2019ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you\\u2019ve hated this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment almost certainly filled with incoherent screaming because you tuned out just as soon as you heard the words \\u2018private equity.\\u2019


Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business, and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

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