The "typical" in my comment was meant to take care of that part, I probably should have mentioned this explicitly. AWS Lambda is of course a case where startup time matters a lot, but it still leaves the common problem of ASP.NET that it was designed around a lot of reflection. My understanding is that this simply won't work with AOT out of the box unless you adapt all the places where you use reflection-based code. For example you'd need to use the source generator versions of JSON serialization and the EF Core DbContext in this case, with all limitations those have. But I'm not sure my understanding here is entirely correct or complete.