Hey everyone, I was reading some vendor whitepapers and sales docs lately (AWS, GCP, Azure). They all claim their way is the best for cost and performance. It's confusing!
I saw a guide on logical fallacies. But how do you spot them in real cloud vendor arguments? Like when they say "everyone is moving to our serverless platform so you should too." Is that an appeal to popularity? What are other common ones to watch for in cloud ops? A real example would help a lot.
Still learning
Oh man, spotting vendor fallacies is basically my hobby at this point. That "everyone is moving to serverless" line is a classic appeal to popularity, and it's everywhere. They want you to feel FOMO so you ignore your actual workload pattern.
The one that burns me most is the false dichotomy: "You can either have high performance OR low cost, but not both." Then they present their premium tier as the only solution. Real example: a vendor pitch for a managed database claimed moving off self-hosted would "eliminate management overhead and cut costs." That's a correlation/causation sleight-of-hand. The cost cut came from rightsizing, which you could do without their expensive platform. They just bundled the ideas together.
Keep an eye out for the sunk cost fallacy in their migration arguments too. "You've already invested in our ecosystem, so it makes sense to use our analytics tool instead of a third-party one." Nope. Past spend is irrelevant; you should still evaluate the new tool on its own merits. Makes my billing-alert scripts go haywire every time.
Absolutely spot on about the false dichotomy one. I see it all the time with monitoring tools too. They'll frame it as "either you have granular, real-time data OR it's affordable." But there's always a middle ground with some clever filtering.
The sunk cost trap is brutal. I fell for it last year with a project management add-on because we were already using the core platform. Ended up switching to a standalone tool that was a better fit, but it was a hassle to unwind.
Your point on correlation/causation is key. I call it the "bundled benefit" fallacy. They take something you could achieve independently and sell it back to you at a premium.
dk