IBM continued its onslaught of news ahead of next week’s Think 2018 event, with the latest involving a cloud analytics platform that can ingest and analyze 1 million events per second.

The Cloud Private for Data platform integrates various IBM data science, data engineering, application building, and security products. That combination is used to help build and take advantage of event-driven applications like artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), online commerce, and mobile devices.

The platform runs as an application layer deployed on Kubernetes and operating through IBM’s Cloud Private product. This deployment model using container software allows for rapid deployment on the IBM cloud, with plans to migrate the new offering to all cloud platforms.

The use of containers also provides an abstraction layer that Rob Thomas, general manager for IBM analytics, said feeds into a data infrastructure layer for AI behind the firewall.

“Whether they are aware of it or not, every company is on a journey to AI as the ultimate driver of business transformation,” Thomas said in a statement. “But for them to get there, they need to put in place an information architecture for collecting, managing, and analyzing their data. With today’s announcements, we are planning to bring the AI destination closer and give access to powerful machine learning and data science technologies that can turn data into game-changing insight.”

IBM continues to use Kubernetes in different products, something that was first seen last year.

James Governor, analyst and co-founder of Redmonk, explained in a post last June that IBM’s Bluemix platform was “increasingly oriented to Kubernetes rather than CloudFoundry.”

“IBM will support CloudFoundry for existing customers, but will be shifting future investments to Kubernetes, and technologies such as OpenWhisk and Istio,” Governor noted. “IBM’s Cloud platform technologists are very, very happy with Kubernetes performance, particularly in terms of resilience, so far.”

IBM earlier this week began offering native Kubernetes support through a managed service model running on bare metal cloud infrastructure. The move allows organizations to eek out higher performance from their container deployments. It’s targeted at companies in need of high computing performance, including large machine learning workloads and sensitive datasets that require isolated servers.

Jason McGee, vice president and CTO for IBM’s cloud platform, said in a blog post that IBM was the “first major cloud provider” to offer Kubernetes support on bare metal infrastructure and not just in a cloud environment. A recent Synergy Research Group report had IBM as the No. 3 cloud provider worldwide in terms of market share, behind Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, but ahead of Google Cloud.

A number of smaller Kubernetes distributors offer bare metal support that can run on cloud platforms. These include the likes of CoreOS and Ubuntu.

The bare metal support slides into IBM’s current Cloud Container Service. The platform allows for management of Kubernetes clusters or Docker single and scalable containers.

IBM is also part of the Kubernetes Certified Service Providers list that defines portability across vendor platforms.

IBM this week also unveiled cloud security updates that protect applications as they move to the cloud and removes security as a roadblock when companies use containers to build and run cloud-native applications.

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