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

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

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 DaveDave Mangot, author of DevOps Patterns for Private Equity, helps portfolio companies get good at delivering software.  He is a leading consultant, author, and speaker as the principal at Mangoteque.  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:Mangoteque: https://www.mangoteque.comDevOps Patterns for Private Equity: https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Patterns-Private-Equity-organization/dp/B0CHXVDX1K“How to Talk Business: A Short Guide for Tech Leaders”: https://itrevolution.com/articles/how-to-talk-business-a-short-guide-for-tech-leaders/

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. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn.

My guest today is someone that I have known for, well, longer than I've been doing this show. Dave Mango is the founder and CEO at Mango Tech. Dave, thank you for joining me. Hey, Corey. It's great to be here. Nice to see you again. I have to say, your last name is Mango, and the name of your company is Mango Tech, 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? Yeah, I don't know. I had 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 because they had been doing consulting for quite some time about what my rates should be, about all kinds of, you know, which vendors I should work with for my legal advice.

And I said, I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with a name for the company. And this guy, Corey Quinn was like, hey, I got a name for you. 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, but mostly AWS, that it's not that hard to name something well.

The trick, I think, is just not to do it in committee. Yeah. And, you know, it was a very small committee, obviously, of like three. But yeah, it's been great. I have a lot of compliments on the name of my company. And I was like, oh, you know that guy, the Quinny Pig dude? And they're like, yeah. Oh, yeah. That was his idea. And I liked it. And it works really well for the things that I do. It seems to. So talk to me about what it is that you do. Because back when we first met, many, many years ago, you were an SRE manager at a now defunct observability company. This was so long ago, I don't think they used the term observability.

It was Labrado, which, what do you do? We do monitoring back when that didn't sound like some old timey thing like, oh yeah, right between the blacksmith and the cobbler. But you've evolved significantly since you were doing the mundane pedestrian tasks of keeping the service up and running. What do you do these days? Yeah, that was before the observability wars, whatever you like 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 I ran 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. So you recently wrote a book. And I know this because I make it a point to get a copy of the book, usually by buying it, but you beat me to it by gifting me one, of every guest I have on the show who's written a book. Sometimes that means I wind up with 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'm going to wind up talking to someone

who wound up writing an encyclopedia or something. We're going to have to back the truck around. But what I wanted to ask is about your title, of all things. It's called DevOps Patterns for Private Equity. And I have to ask, what makes private equity special? 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. Is that how inexpensive books are these days? My God, I was under the impression once you put the word DevOps in the title, that meant you're above one question just because I've been involved

in the DevOps movement since pretty much the start. What 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're serious. And serious means that they're not afraid to make a big investment. They're not afraid to change things quickly. They're 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 they can't just sit around and talk about things and try it and see what happens. In the fullness of time, 20 years from now. Yeah, it doesn't work that well. Let's 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 OK, 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 about 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 sort of sitting there stunned. What's a BlackRock? 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 loves to bring up the Toys R Us story as a for instance. But I don't get the sense that that is the full picture. Tell me more. Yeah. So I'm probably not the best spokesperson for private equity, but... Because you don't work for a private equity firm, you only work with them. That makes you a terrific spokesperson because you're not one to enter this position of, well, justify what your company does here situation. There's something to be said for objectivity. 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's what they're going for. And you and I, having had worked at many companies in our careers, know that there's a lot of companies out there that aren't a good business.

You're like, why are we doing this? This doesn't make any sense. This isn't a good investment. There's a lot of things. And what I would call the professional level private equity firms, the ones at the top, and not all of them at the top are ethical. Don't get me wrong. I have a blacklist here of companies I won't work for. I will not say who those companies are. I am in the same boat. I think that anyone who works in an industry at all and doesn't have a list of companies that they would not do business with is on some level, either hasn't thought it through, hasn't been in business long enough, or frankly, as long as you're paying them, everything you can do is a-okay. And, you know, I'm not going to sit here and say that those are terrible people,

but I never wanted to have 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's money on the table. Like, do you want to go do contracting for a defense company? Well, no, objectively, I don't. But that's a lot harder to say when they're sitting on the table with $20 million in front of you. Do you want to work with a defense company? Because you can rationalize your way into anything when the stakes are high enough. That's where I've always stood on it. But please, continue. I'd love to be in that situation to turn down $20 million. Yeah, that's a hard situation

to find yourself in, right? But regardless, there's a lot of different kinds of private equity firms. Generally, the firms that I work with, they all want, not generally, the ones I work with want to make better companies.

I have had operating partners at these companies tell me, because this always comes up with private equity, there's no way to cut your way to a good company. So the key 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? That's called a buy and build strategy or a platform strategy. Yes. But the purpose of that is to make a better company. The thing that I see a lot of people in our industry, meaning like us tech kind of folks, get 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're in Vegas at reInvent and trying to figure out which bet is going to pay off. But they have no expectation that all the bets are going to pay off. With private equity, the companies have product market fit. They're profitable. If they're 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's a 50-person company or a 5,000-person

company, they're trying to get these companies up to another level so that they're more profitable and more valuable so that either a larger fish will gobble them up or they'll go out on the public markets, like onto the stock market, those kinds of things. But they're trying to make a company that's more valuable. And so not everything looks so good when you're looking at it from the outside, not understanding what these people are trying to do. That's not to say they're not

complete jerks who are in private equity, because there are. Because some parts are missing. Kidding, kidding, kidding. It's a nuanced area and it's complicated just from the perspective of 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's how you slowly introduce a sweeping cultural mindset shift across the organization. That's great, but some of us don't have that kind of runway for what we're trying to achieve to be able to pull that off. So I'm assuming that a lot of the patterns you talk about are emphasizing rapid results. Well, I think the best way to describe this is what we've 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's one great way of making a better company? Adopting DevOps principles. And so for me, one of the things I love about my job is I get to go in and make engineers' lives better. No more working on weekends. No more we're only going to do deployments at 11 o'clock at night. No more we're going to batch things up and ship them three or four times a year, which all of us who've 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'm going in making engineers' lives better when their lives are better. They produce better results because they're not stressed out.

They're 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're getting. So the investors are happier. So for me, I always say like, I'm super lucky because I have a job that's win, win, win. And like, I'm helping them to make a better company. I'm helping them to ship faster. I'm helping them do things in the cloud. I'm helping them get more reliability, which helps them retain customers, all these things. Because we know from the, you know, remember the 2019 state of DevOps report,

highest performers are twice as likely to meet or exceed their organization's 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'm making people's lives better and kind of everybody wins. And so for me, it's super rewarding. That's 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't that ostensibly the goal of every company? Now, everyone says it's their goal, but whether that is their goal or not, I think is a somewhat separate question. Yeah, that should be the goal of every company. I agree. There are people who have read my book and said, hey, this stuff applies far beyond private equity. And I say, yeah, it absolutely does. But there are constraints, gold rat, within private equity about the timing, about the funding, about whatever, to get the thing to another level. And that's an interesting

thing that I've seen is I've 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 did that happen? I've 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's like, are you really a PE company or are you just secretly a giant cat perpetually on the wrong side of a door somewhere? But that's because they 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, in theory, you're going to

want to just get better all the time, forever. This is the Toyota thesis about continual improvement. I am curious as far as what you are seeing changing in the market with the current macro economic conditions, which is a polite way to say the industry going wonky after 10 years of being relatively up and to the right. Yeah, well, I guess the fun thing is we have interest rates. We had a pandemic. We had all this exciting stuff. There's massive layoffs and all this kind of super churny things.

I think the fun thing for me as I went to a private equity conference in San Francisco, I don't 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 the next five to 10 years of private equity are going to be about growth and operational efficiency.

And I was like, that's DevOps. That's awesome. That really works well for me because we want to have people twice as likely to meet or exceed their organization's performance goals. That's growth. And we want operational efficiency, right? 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 10 years are going to be about growth and operational efficiency, I think it's a great opportunity for people to take in a lot of these DevOps principles. And so being on the the screaming in the cloud podcast, like, I think cloud is a huge part of that. I think that's a big way to get growth and operational efficiency, like, how better to be able to scale how better to be able to Deming's PDSA cycle, right plan Plan, do, study, act. How better to run all these experiments to find out how to get better, how to be more efficient, how to meet our customers' demands. I think that's a huge part of it. 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, wow, what an amazing name for the company. How did it come up? How do you come up with it? And you mentioned that you had been asking a bunch of people for advice, or rather, you mentioned you had gotten advice from people. I want to clarify, you were in fact asking. I wasn't basically the human form of Clippy popping up. It looks like you're starting a business. Let me give you unsolicited advice on what you should be doing. What you've 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 that it's clearly working out for you. I think a Corey Quinn clippy would be very distracting in my Microsoft Word, first of all. They're calling it co-pilot now. There's 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 elucidating a Rolodex moment. So if somebody's talking about X or Y and they say, oh yeah, you want to talk to Corey about that, or you want to talk to

Mike about that. And so for me working with private equity portfolio companies, that's a Rolodex moment when people are like, I'm at a portfolio company. We just got bought. They're coming in and they want to understand what our spend is on the cloud and this and that. Like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do here. A lot of times people think of me because I tend to work on those kinds of problems. And so it doesn't mean I can't work on other things. And I definitely do work on other things.

I definitely work with companies that are not owned by private equity. But for me, that's really a place that I enjoy working. And thankfully, I get Rolodex moments from those things. That's the real value that I've found. The line I've heard is always, it's not just someone at a party popping up and saying, oh, yeah, I have that problem. But oh, my God, you need to talk to this person I know who has that problem.

It's 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's easier to identify them in public?

Because I assure you, someone with a big AWS bill is hard to spot out of a crowd. I think that you need to meet people where they are, I think is probably the best way of saying that. So if you are, and this isn't something I need to explain to you, obviously, so this is more for your listeners. But like, if you're going to talk about, hey, I'm looking for companies with large AWS bills, like that's maybe kind of whatever. But if you say, hey, I want to improve your margins and your operational efficiencies, all of a sudden you're starting to speak their language, right? And that language is where people start to understand that, hey, Corey's talking about me. 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, or a former investigative journalist in this case, interview people I'd worked with to get case studies and testimonials from them. But what she would also do was get the exact phrasing that they used to describe the value that I did and how they talked about what we'd done. Because that became something that was, oh, you're 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't quite unlocked that bit of insight yet. 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's say you're not a consultant like me or you. Let's 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 that we go to work is to enable the business. And so shameless plug here, I wrote a paper that came out like two months ago with IT Revolution. So 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 Kistler

and Paul Gaffney and Scott Nacello, a whole bunch of amazing technologists, but it's about speaking the language of business. And as technologists, if we want to really contribute and feel like the work that we are doing is contributing and valuable, you need to start understanding how those other people are talking. 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're trying to do and what you're doing and why this thing is so important. I talk to so many engineers that are like, I talk to management and they just don't understand. And yeah, they don't understand because you're speaking technology language.

They don't want to hear about like CNCF compliant, this, that, and that doesn't mean anything to them. You need to understand in their language, talk to them in their language and say like, hey, this is why this is good for the business. And I think that's a really important thing for people to start to learn. So a question that I have, given that you have been doing this stuff, I think, longer than I have. Back when cloud wasn't really a thing and then it was a thing, but it seemed really irresponsible to. And then it went through several more iterations to the point where now it's everywhere. What's your philosophy of cloud? So I'll 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. Again, this is going back to business talk again, is what they call infrastructure flexibility. And I just don't think you can get infrastructure flexibility if you're not in the cloud. Can you do it? Absolutely. Back over a decade ago, I built out a bunch of stuff in a data center,

and what I call Cloud Principles. We could shoot things in the head, get new ones back. We did all kinds of things. We identified skews of what 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're all just SKUs, right? 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. That is probably true. But like this idea that like

I want to have this infrastructure flexibility isn't just my idea that it's 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's say you've got deployment frequency and lead time for changes, that's say. You've got deployment frequency and lead time for changes. That's speed. How fast can I do something? And you've got time to recover and you've got change failure rate. That's 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 is 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's speed. And then the second requirement and the only other requirement is

build monitoring in from the start. Everything gets monitored. And that's quality. Like if I monitor stuff, I know when I've deployed something that's spiking CPU. I know if it's 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 is code and monitoring. And yes, like you said, I worked at a monitoring or observability company. So perhaps I'm slightly biased. But what I've seen is like companies that adopt those two principles and everything else comes from that. So all my Kubernetes stuff and all those other things are not at odds with those principles.

Those are the people who actually wind up doing really well. And I think those are the people that have state of DevOps support, infrastructure flexibility, and that enables them to have high organizational performance. I think you're onto something. 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, okay, so we're running right now 10,000 instances in our cloud environment. How many admins should it take us to run those?

The correct response is, how the heck are you running those things? Tell me more, because the answer is probably terrifying. Because right now, if you do that correctly, 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. 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 and whatever. And it didn't matter how many we had.

It was all the same. Like if I had 10,000, I had 50,000. It was irrelevant. Like they're all the same kind of crap. It's not that hard to manage a bunch of stuff that's all the same. Like if I had 10,000, I had 50,000 irrelevant, like they're all the same kind of crap. It's not that hard to manage a bunch of stuff that's all the same. If I have 10,000 servers, and each one is a unique special snowflake, because it's I'm 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's going to be a hell of a lot harder to manage than 10,000 things that the load balancer is like, just lay it out. So it's sort of a kind of a nonsense question at this point. You're, you know, like you're saying, like, it doesn't really matter how many. It's complexity. How much complexity do I have? And as we all say in the DevOps movement, complexity isn't free. Which I'll bet is a large component of how you save companies money with a duckbill group. 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 on EC2 instances, nothing higher level built on top of it, because if people's time is free, the cheapest thing

you're going to get is a bunch of instances, the end. That is not really how you should be thinking about this. I know a lot of private equity firms that would love to find a place where time was free. They could make a lot of money. Yeah, pretty sure that the biggest, like, what's your biggest competitive headwind? Wage laws. Like, it doesn't work that way. I'm sorry, but it doesn't. I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me about what you're up to how things are going over in your part of the universe if people want to learn more where's the best place for them to go to find you they can go to mangotech.com I've got all the links to my blog my mailing list

definitely if you're interested in this intersection of DevOps and private equity, sign up for the mailing list. For people who didn't get Corey's funky spelling of my last name, it is a play on the fact that it is French and that I also work with technology companies. So it's M-A-N-G-O-T-E-Q-U-E.com. If you type that in, Mangotech, to any search engine, obviously you will find me. I am not difficult to find on the internet because I've been doing this for quite some time. But thank you for having me on the show.

It's always great to catch up with you. I love hearing about what you're doing. I super appreciate you asking about the things that I'm working on and, you know, been a big help. No, it's deeply fascinating. It's neat to watch you continue to meet your market in a variety of different ways. Dave Mango, CEO and founder of Mango Tech,

which is excellently named. I'm cloud economist, Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. excellently named. I'm cloud economist, Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you've 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 private equity. If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same,

then you need the Duck Bill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duck Bill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.