How do you manage a Route53 hosted zone across different AWS accounts?

Hello,

You can follow the procedure Creating another hosted zone to route traffic for a subdomain. You will create the subdomain in your staging AWS Account and you will add the NS records pointing to your subdomain in the production AWS Account.

Yes. You need to create a separate hosted zone in your staging account to manage your subdomain.

Suppose you have purchased example.com from Route 53 and had the hosted zone example.com configured in your production account. Here are the steps.

1. Create a hosted zone named stg.example.com in your staging account.
2. Check the NS record in the staging hosted zone and note the four name servers (e.g., ns-1341.awsdns-39.org, ns-1563.awsdns-03.co.uk, ns-981.awsdns-58.net, ns-304.awsdns-38.com.)
3. Switch to your production account.
4. In your production hosted zone, create a new NS record and set record values to the name servers for your staging hosted zone you have noted.
5. Switch to your staging account and test if hosted zone is working properly. (e.g., request and validate your ACM certificate)

References:

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/CreatingHostedZone.html

If you want to create a real sub domain,

1. Create the subdomain i.e. subdomain.maindomain.com in your staging account.
2. Obtain the NS records for this subdomain.
3. In your main produciton account domain, create NS records for subdomain and use the 4 NS records you obtained in step 1

Job is done. You can then create all your records in the sub or main domain as needed