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Azure Container Apps is a serverless platform that allows you to maintain less infrastructure and save costs while running containerized AI apps and agents. Instead of worrying about server configuration, container orchestration, and deployment details, Azure Container Apps provides all the up-to-date server resources required to keep your applications stable and secure.
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Common uses of Azure Container Apps include:
- Building AI apps and agents
- Deploying API endpoints
- Hosting background processing jobs
- Handling event-driven processing
- Running microservices
- Securely deploy multi-tenant SaaS apps
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Yes, scale-to-zero is the default configuration. When the minimum instances setting is zero, you pay only when your app is active in response to events and/or requests.
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Yes. Your first 180,000 vCPU per second, 360,000 GiB/s, and 2 million requests per subscription per month are free. Beyond that, you pay for what you use based on the number of vCPU per second and Gbps your applications consume.
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Active usage occurs while your container is starting or while there is at least one request being processed by the application. By default, applications scale to zero. You can also configure Azure Container Apps with a minimum number of instances to always run in idle mode. Idle usage is charged at a reduced rate when the application isn't processing any requests.
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Azure Container Apps Express is the fastest way to go from container image to production-ready app on Azure. With instant provisioning, sub-second startup, and scale-from-zero, it eliminates infrastructure decisions so you can deploy web apps, APIs, and AI agent backends in minutes. Choose Express for speed and simplicity. Choose standard SKUs (Consumption, Flexible, or Dedicated) when you need control over networking, GPU compute, or advanced configuration.
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Use Azure Container Apps Sandbox when you need to execute untrusted code safely, such as AI-generated code, user-submitted scripts, or plugin-style extensions. It spins up isolated, short-lived sessions quickly, scales as needed, and cleans up automatically, which is useful for agentic workflows, multi-tenant SaaS, and interactive development.
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Azure Functions provides integrated support for developing, deploying, and managing containerized function apps on Azure Container Apps.
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Serverless GPUs enable you to seamlessly run your AI workloads on-demand with automatic scaling, optimized cold start, pay-per-second billing. It has built-in data governance with scale-to-zero when not in use, and reduced operational overhead to support easy real-time custom model inferencing and other GPU related tasks. Common scenarios for serverless GPUs include real-time and batch inferencing, compute intensive machine learning, high performance computing (HPC), and data analytics.