Azure News - 2026-09-24

In the Catalyst series, we explore the transformative power of AI by showcasing visionary companies driving scientific and industry breakthroughs powered by Azure and NVIDIA. This video series spotlights how innovation ignites action and how today’s visionaries are shaping tomorrow with the power of AI and cloud innovation.

Building resilience against extreme weather

Tomorrow.io turns space-based data into AI-driven forecasting powered by Azure and NVIDIA at a global scale. Its high-performance AI models deliver real-time weather intelligence that helps governments and enterprises anticipate disruption, optimize operations, and act faster in the face of severe events.

Expanding access in preventative healthcare

Powered by Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA, Helfie uses multimodal AI to transform smartphone selfies into intelligent health screening at scale. By combining advanced models with real-time inference, it delivers rapid biometric insights that help identify risks earlier and expand access to remote and underserved communities.

How AI is mapping the tree of life

Powered by Azure and NVIDIA to build the world’s largest biological databases, Basecamp Research is decoding the complexity of biology to accelerate scientific breakthroughs.

Building the next frontier of data

Powered by Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA, Global Objects is digitizing the real world by creating high-fidelity digital twins of over 5 million physical items. These photorealistic 3D models are transforming immersive content creation across Hollywood, gaming, robotics, and cultural preservation.

Changing how doctors diagnose diseases with AI

Powered by Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA, Pangaea Data is closing care gaps by identifying untreated and under-treated patients across rare and hard-to-diagnose diseases faster, earlier, and more accurately.

Learn more

The Catalyst series explores how organizations are using AI infrastructure to tackle some of their most complex technical and business challenges, from accelerating scientific discovery to advancing autonomous systems and transforming core industries. 

Learn more about Catalyst.

Learn more about Azure AI infrastructure. 

For many web apps and APIs, a container image should be enough to get started. Developers should not have to choose and configure an environment before the first deployment.

Today, Azure Container Apps Express reaches general availability. It is the fastest way to go from a container image to a production-ready app on Azure, with instant provisioning, startup optimized for sub-second performance, and scale-from-zero.

Customers created many thousands of Express apps during public preview and told us, clearly and often, what was missing. That feedback set the priorities for general availability, and it continues to guide what comes next.

From container image to running app

Express starts with the application. Bring a container image, choose a region, add the configuration your app needs, and deploy. In the Express experience, there is no environment to stand up first. Azure provisions the underlying compute, ingress, and scaling.

That shorter path matters when you are shipping a web app or API. It matters even more when the thing doing the shipping is an agent: AI-assisted workflows can create and update apps far faster than anyone can configure infrastructure by hand.

Speed continues after deployment. Express apps can scale to zero when idle and are optimized for sub-second startup when traffic returns. For a measured look at that experience, see Express scale from zero.

Broad regional availability

At general availability, Express is available in more than 40 Azure regions, covering almost every public region where Azure Container Apps is offered. You get the same direct deployment experience while placing applications close to users and data. See the current list in the Express region availability documentation.

Built on Azure Container Apps Sandboxes

Azure Container Apps Express runs on Azure Container Apps Sandboxes, the isolated compute layer behind its provisioning and startup speed.

Developers can also use Sandboxes directly to build agent platforms, secure code-execution services, and other systems that need isolated compute on demand. The Azure Container Apps Sandboxes announcement covers the compute platform underneath Express.

Where Express goes next

We launched Express in public preview while its focused feature set was still taking shape. That gave customers access sooner and let real usage shape the work that followed.

Since preview, we have expanded regional availability, strengthened Express for production workloads, and added capabilities that fit its direct application model. General availability makes Express ready for production use. We will continue adding features while preserving its focus on fast, simple deployment.

Express offers a focused subset of Azure Container Apps capabilities. Choose Express when speed and simplicity matter most. Choose a standard Container Apps environment when you need greater control over networking, GPU compute, advanced configuration, or environment-level capabilities such as Dapr.

Deploy your first Express app

Ready to try it? Create an Azure Container Apps Express app.

Then read the Express documentation, see Express scale from zero, or learn about Azure Container Apps Sandboxes.