Azure Container Apps
Run modern apps and agents using serverless containers.
Quickly build and deploy apps at serverless scale.
OVERVIEW
Agent and developer-first serverless container platform
- Develop AI apps and agents with frameworks and models of your choice. Build MCP tools and servers, and attach a secure sandbox for agent-code executions at runtime. Run short-lived, ephemeral code and long running workflows for stateful and stateless apps.
- Scale dynamically to match any workload including GPUs. Execute in milliseconds and scale from zero in seconds. Unlock cost-efficiency for greenfield and brownfield apps with zero idle costs.
- Go from container image to production in seconds with zero infrastructure decisions. Use familiar cloud-native technologies to deploy apps and agents from code or containers without lock-in. Design resilient, portable agentic microservices and build heterogeneous modern apps with unified centralized networking, observability, configuration, and familiar continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).
- Focus on your apps while eliminating the need to manage underlying infrastructure with an enterprise-grade serverless compute platform. Improve your security posture with built-in support for managed identities, network isolation, tailored container security, and more, all backed by a 99.95% SLA.
FEATURES AND USE CASES
Simplify agentic app development
Scale AI apps on demand
Improve production velocity and lower management costs on a scalable, portable platform with flexible hosting options for any workload.
Open-source foundation and integrations
Get greater extensibility, and built-in support for Distributed Apps Runtime (Dapr) and Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling (KEDA). Bring any agentic framework, data sources, MCP or APIs of your choice to design your AI apps and agents.
Advanced networking
Build apps using a flexible network architecture with virtual network support, private endpoints, and fine-grained ingress and egress controls.
Enhanced security and governance
Monitor container governance at scale, use advanced identity and access management, get full app lifecycle management and leverage confidential compute for specialized workloads.
Deploy anywhere
Host apps on your infrastructure of choice from the cloud to the edge with Azure Arc.
Build multi-tenant SaaS
Run untrusted, AI-generated code in isolated sandboxes to contain risk. Reduce exposure to sensitive data and shared infrastructure while enabling safe, on-demand execution.
Build AI apps and agents
Build and deploy applications that use generative AI to deliver adaptive, responsive, and personalized experiences.
Web applications
Containerize and deploy web applications in seconds with zero infrastructure decisions.
API endpoints
Securely and easily link front-end applications to API endpoints.
Event-driven applications
Respond in near real-time to events and data sources at scale with Dapr and KEDA.
Background processing
Optimize data processing with a streamlined microservices solution design using jobs.
Large Language Model (LLM) code execution
Get fast and scalable access to isolated sessions with a code interpreter designed to run multi-tenant apps and AI-generated code.
AI inferencing
Run AI inference using custom models or models from sources like Hugging Face and Microsoft Foundry. Get automatic scaling, built-in data residency, and pay-per-use pricing without managing infrastructure.
SECURITY
Built-in security and compliance
Pricing
Flexible pricing options to fit your needs
- Get started with the free tier: Your first 180,000 vCPU per second, 360,000 GiB/s, and 2 million requests each month are free.
- Consumption plan: Pay for what you use on a per-second basis, beyond the free allocation.
- Dedicated plan: Benefit from a single tenancy guarantee, access to specialized hardware, and predictable pricing.
- Flexible plan: Enjoy dedicated compute without the hassle of right sizing your compute pool size with pay per use on a per-second basis.
- Savings plan: Save money by committing to spend a fixed hourly amount for one or three years.
- GPU options: Deploy to serverless GPUs for easy AI model inferencing with built-in data governance.
RELATED PRODUCTS
Our products work better together
Use Azure Container Apps with other Azure products to build advanced serverless solutions.
CUSTOMER STORIES
See how customers are innovating with Azure
RESOURCES
How to get started with Azure Container Apps
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Azure Functions provides integrated support for developing, deploying, and managing containerized function apps on Azure Container Apps.
- 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.
Next steps
Choose the Azure account that’s right for you
Pay as you go or try Azure free for up to 30 days.
Serverless on Azure
Build and deploy apps faster using developer-friendly APIs, ready-to-use AI models, and other serverless solutions.
- [1]Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Container Management, By Dennis Smith, Tony Iams, Wataru Katsurashima, Michael Warrilow, Lucas Albuquerque, Stephanie Bauman, 6 August 2025.
- [2]Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Native Application Platforms, By Tigran Egiazarov, Mukul Saha, Prasanna Lakshmi Narasimha, 4 August 2025.
Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Get the Azure mobile app 
