# CLOUDADV: Decision-Aligned Instance Sizing with Zero-Shot Foundation Models under Drift

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31470 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31470/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07815/) (2024)
- [A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10688/) (2023)
- [Smart "Predict, then Optimize"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08005/) (2017)
- [TSMixer: An All-MLP Architecture for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06053/) (2023)
- [Foundation Models for Time Series Analysis: A Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14735/) (2024)
- [Proactive Model Adaptation Against Concept Drift for Online Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08435/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CENTILE: A Telemetry Foundation Model Evaluated by the Decisions It Drives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01725/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cloud virtual machines are often overprovisioned, creating avoidable cost and operational inefficiency. We present CLOUDADV, an interactive engineer-facing advisory system for cloud instance sizing under workload drift. The system combines zero-shot time-series forecasting with bounded recommendation generation across day-, week-, and month-scale planning horizons. For each query, CLOUDADV constructs a structured decision context from historical utilization, forecast summaries, current VM metadata, candidate instance options, pricing, and explicit sizing heuristics. A higher-capacity LLM is used offline to generate reference recommendations, while a smaller production model is evaluated on the same prompts to assess deployment-time alignment under latency and cost constraints. Evaluation prioritizes downstream recommendation quality using simulated Azure cost savings and ex-post exceedance, with rolling-origin forecast accuracy reported as a secondary diagnostic against classical and supervised baselines. In a case study of seven production VMs, the reference recommendations reduce simulated monthly cost from about 1,503 to 708, yielding 795/month in savings (52.9%) under conservative heuristic constraints, while the highest observed exceedance rate among downgraded cases is 1.5%. Although Chronos-2 does not minimize every forecasting metric, it often induces recommendation patterns similar to those of a supervised per-VM baseline. These results suggest that zero-shot foundation models can support decision-aligned provisioning in non-stationary cloud environments while reducing the operational burden of repeated per-tenant retraining, revalidation, and redeployment.