Azure Updates: RabbitMQ Extension; Monitor for Containers; Smart letterboxes; Microsoft ScaleUp

For many around the world, Christmas dominated the last week's news. This year, holiday celebrations for Christmas, New Years, Hanukkah, and other holidays have been muted with online services and many events shifted virtual.

In spite of the holiday, a few Azure news items did surface. Microsoft indicated the general availability of the RabbitMQ Extension for Windows and Linux, together with ingress logs for Time Series Insights environments. Meanwhile, Monitor for Containers support for Private Clusters is in public preview along with Automation Python 3 runbook support, which is on-offer in all public cloud regions.

According to Microsoft, Singapore Post (SingPost) is one of many national postal services and private parcel services witnessing soaring demand in recent years, due in-part to e-commerce. During lockdowns this year, SingPost delivered a record number of e-commerce packages and launched its PostPal smart letterbox system. Powered by IoT Edge, it sorts mail in a centralized way using QR codes. Other postal services are undergoing similar transformations like Posti, in Finland, or Pošta Slovenije in Slovenia.

"Azure IoT technology enables reliable, scalable, and secure integration across PostPal’s various processes and applications, which will help to drive its long-term success," stated Vincent Phang, CEO of Postal Services and Singapore for SingPost.