Moving away from cloudflare

Question

I set up cloudflare for a domain a few weeks ago as a stopgap to have TLS. I now want to move this domain to AWS and Route 53.

The domain has been added to Route 53, but I'm not sure how to change the NS/SOA records for the domain. The settings I would like to have are set in Route 53, but I'm not sure how I should move it from Cloudflare with no downtime. (I didn't dare to “delete” it from Cloudflare.)

Here's the current SOA (from dig):

mydomain.com.       86400   IN  SOA abby.ns.cloudflare.com. dns.cloudflare.com. 2023806844 10000 2400 604800 3600

and the current values for NS:

mydomain.com.       86400   IN  NS  roan.ns.cloudflare.com.
mydomain.com.       86400   IN  NS  abby.ns.cloudflare.com.

I tried adding the four NS records from Route 53 to the domain in Cloudflare, but that doesn't seem to have had an effect (it's been 24 hours) and since there weren't any NS records there from before, it's probably not what I should be doing…

What's the correct process for doing a transfer like this? Am I even correct in that SOA and NS changes is what needs to happen?

Answer 1

Make sure that the records in your zone on Route 53 are correct, and then just update your registrar to point to the AWS Route 53 zones.

You do not want any NS records in Cloudflare or Route 53 that do not belong to that provider unless you plan on keeping both of those providers (and you're not) active at the same time.

For 90% of use cases, you want your NS records to read exactly as you submit to your registrar.

So update your registrar with the Route 53 records, wait 24 hours for the existing NS record cache to expire (86400s is 24 hours), and then you can decommission your CloudFlare account.