The Virtustream μVM is a fine-grained unit of measurement designed to fairly and accurately measure the actual consumption of cloud resources in xStream-powered clouds. Like the kilowatt hour (kWh) consumption metric that your home’s electric bill is based on, the μVM measures your actual consumption of compute, memory, network and storage resources. This is in direct contrast to the instance-hour billing scheme used by most cloud providers, which is based upon allocated rather than consumed resources.