CreateOS Sandbox vs Azure Container Apps
For a code-interpreter tool inside an Azure LLM app, with Entra ID auth and egress off by default, Azure Container Apps Dynamic Sessions is the natural choice. For agent environments that must live longer than an hour, keep state, or be paused and forked, CreateOS Sandbox fits better. Microsoft also sells a separate, newer Azure Container Apps Sandboxes product that this page does not cover.
Pricing at a Glance
CreateOS rates verified 17 October 2026. Azure Container Apps pricing as published on 17 October 2026. Rates billed per GB rather than per GiB, or as bundled sizes, are quoted as published rather than converted.
CreateOS Sandbox
Lower compute rate- Compute
- $0.0362 /vCPU-hr
- Memory
- $0.0116 /GiB-hr
Azure Container Apps
- Compute
- $0.0864 /vCPU-hr
- Memory
- $0.0108 /GiB-hr
Microsoft's East US retail prices list Dynamic Sessions at $0.03 per session-hour, billed in one-hour increments, and Consumption-plan compute at $0.000024/vCPU-s active and $0.000003/GiB-s, as of 17 October 2026.
Where CreateOS Sandbox Fits Better
What CreateOS Sandbox brings to this matchup, with a plain note on where Azure Container Apps has the edge.
No execution or idle cap, where a code interpreter session stops each execution at 220 seconds and is destroyed after at most an hour idle.
Pause, resume and fork, none of which Microsoft documents for Dynamic Sessions.
Per-host egress allowlists; Azure session pools are all-or-nothing, EgressDisabled or EgressEnabled.
Per-second billing, where code interpreter sessions round up to whole session-hours.
Where Azure Container Apps is strong
Hyper-V isolated code-interpreter sessions with egress off by default and subsecond allocation from prewarmed pools (vendor-stated), managed inside an Azure subscription with Entra ID auth, plus ready-made LangChain, LlamaIndex and Semantic Kernel tools.
Which to Pick
Pick CreateOS Sandbox if
- Agent sessions run for hours or days and need state kept between steps.
- You need some outbound access, limited to specific hosts.
- You want to pause a session and fork it into copies.
Pick Azure Container Apps if
- You are on Azure and want a managed code-interpreter tool with Microsoft identity and billing.
- Your code runs in short bursts under 220 seconds and should never reach the network.
- You need FedRAMP High audit scope (vendor-stated) or Azure governance.
Head-to-Head Comparison
Every dimension side by side, checked on 17 October 2026 against each vendor's own docs and pricing pages. "Not published" means we could not find it on the vendor's pages, not that the feature is missing.
| Dimension | CreateOS Sandbox | Azure Container Apps |
|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel | Dynamic Sessions: Hyper-V per session. Container apps: containers on managed Kubernetes |
| Create and destroy by API | Yes: REST API, CLI, MCP server and SDKs for TypeScript, Go, Python, Rust, C# and Java (all but TypeScript pre-1.0) | Yes: REST data-plane API for sessions, Azure CLI, ARM/Bicep |
| Memory snapshot (pause and resume) | Yes: disk, memory and CPU state saved; vCPU stops billing, memory and storage still bill | Not documented for Dynamic Sessions; sessions are ephemeral |
| Fork | Yes: fork a paused sandbox into many independent sandboxes | No (not documented for Dynamic Sessions) |
| Outbound network controls | Open with no rules; deny-by-default once any host, IP, CIDR or wildcard rule exists, enforced on the host outside the VM | Disabled by default per pool, switchable to enabled; no per-host allowlist documented |
| Billing granularity | Per second while running: $0.03616363/vCPU-hr, $0.01159025/GiB-hr, storage $0.0001584/GB-hr | Code interpreter per session-hour in one-hour increments; Consumption plan per second |
| Largest size | 8 vCPU / 16 GB on Enterprise; 8 vCPU / 8 GB on Pro | Consumption 4 vCPU / 8 GiB per replica; code interpreter session size not published |
| GPU | None; no GPU shapes | Yes for container apps (T4, A100); not for code interpreter sessions |
Common Questions
How long can an Azure Dynamic Sessions code execution run?
Each code execution is capped at 220 seconds, and an idle session is destroyed after a cooldown of 300 to 3,600 seconds that resets with each request. CreateOS sandboxes have no lifetime cap, and idle auto-pause is off unless you set it between 60 seconds and 24 hours.
Can Azure session pools allow only certain outbound hosts?
Not on the pages read. A session pool is either EgressDisabled, the default, or EgressEnabled. CreateOS starts open, and once you add a host, IP, CIDR or wildcard rule, only listed destinations pass, enforced on the host outside the VM.
How is Azure Dynamic Sessions billed compared with CreateOS?
Dynamic Sessions charges $0.03 per session-hour in East US, counted in one-hour increments from allocation to deallocation. CreateOS charges per second for vCPU, memory and storage, so a 20-minute 1 vCPU / 1 GB sandbox comes to about $0.016.
Sources
Checked 17 October 2026.
- Azure Container Apps: Hyper-V isolation, startup claim, lifecycle, regions
- Azure Container Apps: max sessions, cooldown, egress default, lifecycle types, custom container ingress
- Azure Container Apps: 220 s execution limit, 128 MB upload, auth, framework integrations
- Azure Container Apps: billing model, free grant, session-hour increments, E16 instances
- Azure Container Apps: exact unit prices (East US)
- Azure Container Apps: free grant, meter structure (prices not rendered without JS)
- Azure Container Apps: Consumption max shape, limitations
- Azure Container Apps: quotas, GPU quotas, session pool quota
- Azure Container Apps: FedRAMP High / DoD IL2
- CreateOS pause, resume and fork
- CreateOS egress rules
- CreateOS Sandbox pricing
See CreateOS Sandbox for yourself
Book a demo, or explore the Sandbox and its pricing.