Private cloud services company Platform9 Systems Inc. has just scored a $22 million Series C funding round as it looks to build on its recent achievements in managed services for software containers.

Platform9 is an interesting company that focuses on helping organizations build so-called private clouds, which attempt to replicate the benefits of public clouds in customer’s own data centers. It provides services that it claims can transform a customer’s infrastructure and into an agile, self-service private cloud. The company said it can help organizations of all sizes take their existing servers and morph them into resources like those of cloud leader Amazon Web Services Inc.

More recently Platform9 has moved into the sphere of application containers, a relatively new technology that’s taking the developer community by storm in recent years by virtue of its ability to run applications on multiple kinds of operating systems. In January, the company announced a new managed Kubernetes offering. Kubernetes is an open-source orchestration platform that’s used to manage containers, and Platform9’s managed service helps users manage containerized workloads and manage Docker containers in production.

At the same time, Platform9 also announced an offering called Fission, which is an open-source framework for serverless functions on Kubernetes that’s similar to AWS’ Lambda product. Fission enables DevOps teams, which combine software developers with operations staff, to leverage Kubernetes for a variety of applications, and the company positions it as an alternative to Lambda for those who don’t want to be locked into Amazon’s ecosystem.

“Enterprises today are racing to adopt the cloud, but struggle with managing numerous infrastructure silos, ranging from legacy virtualized data centers to pockets of public cloud deployments,” said Sirish Raghuram, chief executive officer of Platform9. “With our novel SaaS approach to complex cloud frameworks, we enable infrastructure anywhere to be easily managed using industry-leading open-source frameworks such as Kubernetes and OpenStack.”

Platform9 said the latest round was led by Canvas Ventures, with participation from Hewlett Packard Ventures and existing investors Menlo Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. The round brings the company’s total funding to date to $36.5 million. The company said it plans to use the cash to hire more sales, product and marketing staff while boosting investments in its engineering projects with the goal of creating new hybrid cloud capabilities.

“Enterprises know they have to move to the cloud sooner or later,” said Gary Little, a partner at Canvas Ventures. “Platform9 simplifies the challenge, helping companies migrate to cloud computing more quickly and cost effectively than any other solution. It also helps customers avoid being locked into a single cloud provider. That’s something that resonates with chief technology officers across industries.”

Image: Alexander Steinhof/Flickr