A few months back I was sitting in front of GCP Compute Engine pricing for the hundredth time, trying to pick a machine type for a Nextflow process that runs maybe four times a month. The workflow had eighteen processes. Most of them were over-provisioned by a healthy margin. A few were under-provisioned and failing intermittently, because someone (me, probably) had picked a size that was fine on a small test dataset and never revisited it.

I wanted a tool that would just tell me: for this declared CPU and RAM, which machine type is the best fit, ranked by cost or performance or availability. Something I could drop into the pipeline DSL and stop thinking about.

That tool, as far as I could tell, did not exist for batch workloads.

What the existing tools actually solve

Every major cloud has a built-in recommender. GCP has Recommender. AWS has Compute Optimizer. Azure has Advisor.…