How does Route 53 connect multiple public hosted zones to one domain name?

Question

I have two public hosted zones in Amazon Route 53 for the same domain name (which has Route 53 as registrar), for the reason that Route 53 automatically created one when I registered the domain name and that the second one was created by Terraform.

As far as I can tell, DNS record sets in the second zone aren't applied, i.e. they're not returned for queries to the domain. Do I have to delete the first zone in order for record sets in the second zone to be active?

Answer 1

Following is an extract from the AWS Route 53 FAQ

Q. Can I create multiple hosted zones for the same domain name? 

Yes. Creating multiple hosted zones allows you to verify your DNS setting in a “test” environment, and then replicate those settings on a “production” hosted zone. For example, hosted zone Z1234 might be your test version of example.com, hosted on name servers ns-1, ns-2, ns-3, and ns-4. Similarly, hosted zone Z5678 might be your production version of example.com, hosted on ns-5, ns-6, ns-7, and ns-8. Since each hosted zone has a virtual set of name servers associated with that zone, Route 53 will answer DNS queries for example.com differently depending on which name server you send the DNS query to.

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