Three years ago, a 15-second cold start was industry-leading. Today, developers and AI agents expect sub-second. The speed bar has moved, and the tooling needs to move with it.
After running Azure Container Apps for years, we've learned something important: for most developers, the ACA environment is an unnecessary construct. It adds provisioning time, configuration surface, and cognitive overhead — when all you really want is to run your app with scaling, networking, and operations handled for you.
At the same time, a new class of workloads has emerged. Agent-first platforms — systems where AI agents deploy endpoints on demand, spin up tool-use APIs, and tear them down when work is done — demand an even more radical focus on speed and simplicity. Every second of provisioning delay is wasted agent productivity.
Today, we're launching Azure Container Apps Express in Public Preview — the fastest, simplest way to go from a container image to an internet-reachable app on Azure, ready for many production-style workloads.
ACA Express removes the infrastructure decisions. There's no environment to provision, no networking to configure, no scaling rules to write. You bring a container image, Express handles everything else.
Behind the scenes, Express runs your container on pre-provisioned capacity with sensible defaults baked in — so you skip environment setup without giving up ACA's serverless model. There's more coming in this space soon — keep watching.
Here's what that means in practice:
- Instant provisioning — your app is running in seconds, not minutes
- Sub-second cold starts — fast enough for interactive UIs and on-demand agent endpoints
- Scale to and from zero — automatic, no configuration required (full scaling controls coming soon)
- Per-second billing — pay only for what you use
- Production-ready defaults — ingress, secrets, environment variables, and observability are built in
Express is purpose-built for two audiences: developers who want to ship fast (SaaS apps, APIs, web dashboards, prototypes) and agents that deploy on demand (MCP servers, tool-use endpoints, multi-step workflow APIs, human-in-the-loop UIs). If you've ever waited for an ACA environment to provision, only to realize you didn't need half of the configuration options it asked you for — Express is your answer.
Note: West Central US is currently the only available region. We will expand to new regions through the coming days.
Express is in Public Preview starting today. It's a deliberate early ship — there's a meaningful feature gap compared to the existing Azure Container Apps offering, and we're filling it fast. New capabilities are landing on a rapid cadence throughout the preview, and by Microsoft Build in June, Express should be close to feature-complete.
For the current list of supported features, known gaps, and what's on the way, see the Express documentation.
We'd rather put valuable technology in your hands early and iterate with you than wait behind closed doors for perfection.
| Scenario | Why Express |
|---|---|
| SaaS apps and APIs | Deploy and scale without infrastructure planning |
| AI app frontends | Chat UIs and copilot frontends that scale with usage spikes |
| MCP servers | Expose API endpoints for AI agents in seconds |
| Agent workflows | Spin up endpoints on demand, tear down when done |
| Prototypes and startups | Go from idea to production in minutes |
| Web dashboards | Internal tools with instant availability |
Express is available now in Public Preview. Try it:
- Azure Container Apps Express overview — concepts, capabilities, and the current feature support matrix
- Deploy your first app with the Azure CLI — step-by-step quickstart
- New Azure Container Apps Portal — create and manage Express apps alongside your existing Container Apps resources
Have questions? Check the Azure Container Apps Express FAQ for answers to common questions about pricing, limits, regions, and the road to GA.
We're building Express in the open and we want to hear from you. Tell us what features matter most, what works, and what doesn't — reach out on the Azure Container Apps GitHub or in the comments below.