Why are the value for Hosted Zone ID different for ELB and Route 53 Alias Target?

Question

Here is my load balancer Sid-LB - the Hosted Zone ID is highlighted:

And this is the Route 53 (hosted zone id is highlighted) when I select the load balancer from Alias Target.

I dont understand why these two IDs have to be different. I tried to send an API call with the payload (containing the ELB hosted zone id) to create the record set, which it creates but doesnt work. How is this Alias Hosted Zone ID for Route 53 generated and does it have any connection with the ELB Hosted Zone ID??

Answer 1

You can get the Hosted Zone ID of Elastic Load Balancing here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/elb.html

In your case I can see that the Hosted Zone ID is the one for US West (Oregon) - us-west-2.

Answer 2

The docs are a little vague about this:

This value appears automatically based on the value that you selected or entered for Alias Target.

However, the Alias Hosted Zone ID is not the same as the Hosted Zone ID. To create an Alias record, you just need the Hosted Zoned ID. Check out some of the sample requests provided here. They all take a HostedZoneId parameter.

So for your use case, I think you can just ignore it. All you need to know is that the 'Hosted Zone ID' and an Alias record's 'Alias Hosted Zone ID' are not the same thing.