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Introduction to QUM

Written by Rajat Panwar | Mar 16, 2025 3:46:04 PM
Tired of unpredictable cloud bills and rigid VM configurations?
Say hello to 'QUM' Compute Unit—a game-changing model that offers fixed costs and limitless flexibility. No more guessing how many VMs you’ll need or your monthly cloud bill gonna look like. With Compute Units, you decide how to allocate your cloud power, while we take care of the rest.

What's a qum?


QUM is a compute unit which is your all-in-one cloud powerhouse. One QUM offers you cloud capacity having:
  • 8 vCPUs
  • 20 GB RAM
  • 200 GB Storage
  • Unlimited Network
Buy one or more units, and deploy any combination of VMs that fits within your unit’s resources. It’s like having a customizable cloud Lego set: snap together VMs however you want, as long as they fit in the box.
We are soon launching Load Balancer and Kubernetes (among other features) and they would also be able to take the advantage of capacity available within allocated compute unit.
 

What's the benefit of QUM?

QUM offers fixed cost billing irrespective of workload being run on it. It also allows instant elasticity to increase or reduce compute capacity as needed.

There are many horror stories out there where a misconfiguration in cloud caused a billing explosion and those mistakes are realized when the damage is already done.

With QUMs, you won't have to worry about your cloud costs.

why was the qum invented?

Qumulus is on a mission to create portable cloud, far away from vendor lock-in. It would allow customers to own their cloud and a choice to them to either run on servers managed and provisioned by Qumulus Cloud or any other Data Centre of their choice or servers within their premises or even Hybrid.

So the question comes is how do we manage the pricing? Billing for every single service running in different Data Centers or customer owned hardware would introduce huge pricing complexity and unpredictability. And this a very real problem where customers are already battling with existing providers even when they are on single cloud.

There are many companies out there having business model of optimizing cloud costs for their customers.

We wanted to break this complexity so customers could focus on running their workload instead of calculating their cloud costs.

Since any service/workload to run requires 4 basic components namely Compute, Memory, Storage and Network and that's what we procure in the Data Centers. And that's how we would bill our customers so pricing and portability becomes simple!

And that's exactly what we do in our day to day life. We all use laptops, smartphones, macs, desktops. They all come with fixed compute capacity and we can run as many applications on them without incurring cost for each run of app (unless they are paid).

QUM offers the same ease, brings predictability and breaks the complexity.

HOW MUCH 1 QUM costs?

Along with reducing cloud pricing complexity, we also wanted to make cloud more affordable.

1 QUM comes at a cost of USD 85 per month and this price is highly competitive. It offers upwards of 2.5x cost savings when compared to other cloud providers for similar compute capacity  

HOW does QUM perform?

We did some benchmarking to compare how a VM on Qumulus Cloud performs compared to similar capacity VM on other cloud providers.

We compared with aws, azure, gcp and digitalocean using geekbench6 and sysbench. All VMs were running Ubuntu 24.04

VMs were created on all of these platform using 2 vCPUs and 8 GB RAM with following instance types and tentative monthly cost (UK region). These costs on other platform would vary based on the storage and network utilization.

With Qumulus, its slightly different. Qumulus does not sell a VM of 2 vCPUs and 8 GB RAM. Instead a Compute Unit of 8 vCPUs, 20 GB RAM and 200 GB Storage is sold for $ 85/month. So after creating a VM of 2 vCPUs and 8 GB RAM, there is still more than double capacity available for additional use. We may assume cost of running this VM as $ 30/month.

 

Provider Instance Type Monthly Cost
Azure Standard D2s v4  $ 81
aws m5a.large  $ 72
gcp e2-standard-2  $ 63
Digital Ocean Premium AMD  $ 42
Qumulus Cloud Platform m1.medium  $  30

 

Getting Geekbench installed on ubuntu is super easy. Execute following commands sequentially and you can view the results 

 
tar xf Geekbench-6.2.1-Linux.tar.gz
cd Geekbench-6.2.1-Linux
./geekbench6

Qumulus offers double the performance for half the cost. Check out the results below.

Azure Standard D2s v4 Geekbench

Aws m5a.large Geekbench

Gcp e2-standard-2 Geekbench

DigitalOcean Premium AMD 2vCPU Geekbench

Qumulus m1.medium Geekbench

Below are screenshots taken throughout the test

 

QUMULUS CLOUD

DIGITALOCEAN

AZURE

AWS

 

GCP