How to Set Up Subdomains in Route 53 with GoDaddy?

Yep, you'll definitely need a public hosted zone for each subdomain, and you'll need to delegate the NS records from your main domain’s zone for each subdomain as well. If you have a sizable number of them, automating the process can save you a lot of time.

Usually, you should create a separate hosted zone for each subdomain you want to manage with Route 53. This will produce the necessary NS records that you'll then need to add to GoDaddy for those subdomains. Best practices might vary a bit depending on your exact setup or the number of subdomains you have, but it generally isn't too complicated.

If you have a lot of subdomains to migrate, it’s best to automate the process with the AWS CLI and the GoDaddy API if you have access. For Route 53, create a hosted zone and grab the list of NS records it generates. Then, delegate those NS records on GoDaddy. Remember that AWS will create new NS records for each subdomain.

I see you want to keep GoDaddy as your registrar while using Route 53 for DNS management, which is perfectly fine. You just need to create a hosted zone for each subdomain and add a record for each one. Once you’ve got everything set up, you’ll just change the nameservers in GoDaddy to point to the AWS nameservers, and you should be good to go!

If you don't want to deal with tons of individual subdomains like customer1.mydomain.com or customer2.mydomain.com, I suggest doing this: create one hosted zone for a general customer subdomain, like customer.mydomain.com. Then you can create customer-specific subdomains under that, such as c1.customer.mydomain.com. Just make sure to use CNAME records to point the old subdomains to the new ones.