AppFormix, a startup devoted to IT infrastructure management in cloud environments, on Tuesday released its first generally available product through a partnership with OpenStack player Mirantis.

Targeted at IT administrators who fear runaway consumption of public and private cloud resources by disparate business units within their companies, the service installs agent software on each host, which monitors and can regulate how each container or virtual machine uses resources.

"Often, internal users can enable any workload on the cloud," says AppFormix CEO and founder Sumeet Singh. "IT administrators don't have control over that — all you have control over is the host infrastructure."

A veteran of Cisco, which acquired his previous startup NetSift, Singh most recently worked for Microsoft Azure before leaving in 2013 to found AppFormix. The company has raised $7 million to date, in a Series A led by August Capital.

Initially, says Singh, the company was not focused on OpenStack environments (and he notes that its service also works in other environments). But the decision to partner with Mirantis, which will offer the software through its Mirantis Unlocked partnership program, came after Singh saw a wave of movement toward OpenStack.

"In talking with customers, the big question for everyone was 'What's going to be the data center operating system?'" says Singh. "What we found — it truly was OpenStack."

"We were seeing the shift away from VMware to OpenStack."