AWS

Textract can do more than just extract plain text, it can also identify fields in a form and extract the key-value pairs. In this post, I’ll show how to use it to extract key-value pairs from a tax document.

Occasionally you need to extract text from an image. Amazon Textract makes this easy. In this post, I’ll show how to use it to extract text from a single image.

Amazon Polly can convert text to speech in a variety of voices. In this post, I’ll use it to read a file containing a dialogue from the play Julius Caesar where Cassius and Brutus discuss Caesar, using a different voice for each speaker.

It’s easy to string together Amazon Translate and Amazon Polly to translate text, and then speak it in a different language.

Using Amazon Polly to convert text to speech is very easy, with a small .NET console application you can send the text to Amazon and play it on your computer.

Even though Native AOT on .NET 7 doesn’t support ASP.NET Core applications yet, you can use AWS Lambda functions with Native AOT to easily handle HTTP requests.

If you run a full ASP.NET Web API application in AWS Lambda function, here is a way to warm up many execution environments ahead of time to reduce cold starts.

If you know that your Lambda function needs to handle bursts of activity at a predictable time, and you want to avoid the slower response of cold stars for that burst, you can force the Lambda service to warm up execution environments for you ahead of the burst.

The release of .NET 7 brings with it a new way to compile and run .NET code - native AOT compilation. This post compares the cold start time of a Lambda function running on .NET 7 after native AOT compilation with the cold start time of a Lambda function running on .NET 6 with the managed runtime. The results are surprisingly good.

Cold starts with .NET AWS Lambda functions are a concern for some, but provisioned concurrency provides a simple and cost-effective way to keep your Lambda function warm.