Somewhere between "I have a container" and "it has a URL", Azure traditionally asks you thirty questions: an environment, a Log Analytics workspace, ingress, scale rules, registries, sizing. I know the questions well. I wrote the Bicep, and I have paid for wrong answers with production outages.

Azure Container Apps Express removes the questions. A container becomes a public URL in minutes: no environment to manage, scale from zero to hyperscale, an optimized cold start, and nothing on the bill while nobody is calling you. It is the platform-as-a-service dream rebuilt on containers, and this session puts it on a stopwatch.

We race Express against a full standard Container Apps pipeline, live. We measure the cold start, trigger a burst, watch it fall back to zero, then do the cost arithmetic with numbers from my own systems. Then we try to run something real on it and meet the fine print: the features still in development, the workarounds that exist today, and the signals that you have outgrown the express lane.

For developers who want their containers on Azure without adopting a platform team, and architects deciding where Express fits.

A container becomes a public URL in minutes: no environment, scale to zero, pay per request. I race Azure Container Apps Express against the full standard pipeline live, measure the cold start, do the cost math, and read the fine print. The PaaS dream, container edition.