Right-sizing Recommendations (RSR): Cloud Workload Conformal Prediction for Virtual Machines in Data Center Operations

Abstract

Managing cloud infrastructure efficiently, especially in environments of large cloud providers or hyperscalers, requires optimizing the use of physical resources to minimize costs and maximize performance. Selecting the right virtual machine (VM) sizes is crucial to achieving cost efficiency in these dynamic environments. However, traditional VM allocation and scheduling approaches often fail to account for the fluctuating and unpredictable nature of VM utilization, leading to inefficiencies such as over- or under-provisioning of resources. High-quality interval prediction helps accurately capture uncertainty in cloud resource demand and supports cloud operators in efficient instance provisioning. As an effective and reliable framework for constructing prediction intervals (PIs), conformal prediction (CP) is used for mid- and long-term forecasting tasks in cloud computing environments. This study proposes a new data-driven PI construction approach using bootstrapping conformal prediction for modern, dynamic, data-driven Right-sizing Recommendations (RSR) to enhance provisioning for diverse application workloads on hyperscalers. By learning workload utilization patterns, identifying correlations across multiple time series, and predicting medium- to long-term utilization trends, this research seeks to improve the efficiency of cloud and data center operations through an AI/ML-based provisioning pipeline. Our study demonstrates that AI-driven models, powered by machine learning regression techniques and evaluated using backtesting, achieve promising forecasting results for cloud resource utilization. Additionally, we rank the selected models to identify top-performing approaches for long-life VM candidates. The proposed framework enhances right-sizing recommendations and supports more cost-effective resource allocation in dynamic cloud environments.