Hewlett-Packard Co. is taking a step closer toward its promise of offering a public cloud service by providing early access to select testers.

HP announced on Wednesday that it has launched its HP Cloud Services private beta program. The company says it has made early access available for users to test and provide input on its two initial cloud services: HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage.

The first is HP Cloud Compute, which allows customers to deploy compute instances on-demand much like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The second offering, HP Cloud Object Storage, provides scalable online storage on-demand, targeted at archiving, data backup, serving static content for Web apps, and storing large data sets including online files and media, Sayegh said. HP Cloud Object Storage is poised to compete with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

With both services, users can manage their work through a Web-based user interface and REST (Representational State Transfer)-based APIs (application programming interfaces).

The infrastructure supports integration with the open source OpenStack platform through a Web-based graphical user interface and RESTful application programming interfaces, he said. HP joined the OpenStack project in late July.

Its goal is to provide the next generation of cloud infrastructure, platform services and cloud solutions for developers, ISVs, and businesses of all sizes. They recognize that public cloud services should be open and transparent from end-to-end across APIs, infrastructure and software stack.

HP has already tested the services with a few users, but now it is expanding the user base for additional testing. The company advises that, during the beta trial, users should not deploy production workloads.

“We already collected some great feedback during our first development stage, which strongly influenced our private beta offerings.  Now we would like to hear from more of you and get your input on features, functionality and the overall experience, in order to ensure that we continue to create an offering that matches your needs” says Emil Sayegh on his blog post.

HP invites users to sign up for the HP Cloud Services free private beta to develop, test and run your applications. To register, simply visit www.hpcloud.com. They are accepting only a limited number of private beta applicants—so be sure to register early.