Delay in website availability after record registration

Question

Hello everyone, I'm studying AWS and I'm experimenting with some of its features. I have a doubt on something happening when I try to create a new route 53 record (type A) and attach it to my public domain.
I've already purchased a public domain and I see the "default" hosted zone (the one created automatically by route 53). 
The thing is, when I create a new record of type A, to link my public domain to an internal ALB, the public domain remains not reachable for (it seems to me) a variable amount of type every time I create it. Then, after some minutes, the website becomes available and everything runs smoothly.
The question is: why is it not immediately visible? I'm seeing a lag due to the fact that DNS must be updated, and this takes some time?
I hope the question is clear, thank you!

Riku_Kobayashi · Accepted Answer

Hello.

When you create or update a new DNS record in Route 53 (or any other DNS service), that change must be propagated throughout the Internet.  
Therefore, access may not be possible until propagation is complete.

By the way, Route53 can take 60 seconds to propagate to an edge location.  
https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/route-53-propagate-dns-changes  
> There are over 100 edge locations in Route 53 with DNS name servers that answer DNS queries from clients. When you update a record set in your hosted zone, the change propagates to all Route 53 edge locations within 60 seconds. The edge locations update with the latest information from your hosted zone, and the edge locations respond to client queries accordingly. If a client sends a query directly to the domain name's hosted zone name servers, then the client receives the correct response.

By the way, it seems that you are trying to set the domain for internal ALB, but where is this supposed to be accessed from?  
In the case of internal ALB, you need to be careful as it can only be accessed from within the VPC or from on-premises via VPN or DirectConnect.

Davide · Answer

Thank you, now it's clearer. About ALB: my alb stays in front of two ec2 instances (one serves static js content, the other one with my backend API) and routes the traffic to them.. But the ALB is not internal (using Terraform, I set the internal flag to false). Actually I didn't know about this, so you are saying that if the ALB was internal, I wasn't able to route traffic to it?

Edit: I'm using an A record with alias at the moment, probably this is the reason why everything worked

Delay in website availability after record registration

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