Platform9, the cloud management service founded by former VMware engineers, today revealed its plans to offer a private cloud management service using a fork of OpenStack, the open source cloud platform.

The Weather Channel and ad tech firm PubMatic are among the beta customers for the service, which allows companies to turn private servers into in-house versions of public cloud services like Amazon's.

"Once customers have started spending more than $100,000 a month on Amazon, they start looking at that cost very carefully," says Platform9 CEO and co-founder Sirish Raghuram, a former VMware engineer. "Amazon is expensive."

The alternative, deploying and managing a private cloud, can be complex. Raghuram critiques existing private cloud services as "so obsessed with the low-level and the last level of juice they can extract from every virtual machine, they kind of missed the big picture of running a cloud."

Platform9's service deploys and manages OpenStack on private servers remotely, a process the company says takes only hours. Speed is one of Raghuram's key pitches — and for what it's worth, his company has moved quickly since launching with $4.5 million in Series A funding in August.

Platform9 has bolted on a few proprietary features to OpenStack, but service and support are the company's core value proposition, says Raghuram.

"OpenStack today is more like a framework than a finished product," he says. "You need a lot of DevOps skills to run an OpenStack cluster."