fast, easy, and slightly dangerous recursive deletion of a domain’s DNS
Amazon Route 53 currently charges $0.50/month per hosted zone for your first 25 domains, and $0.10/month for additional hosted zones, even if they are not getting any DNS requests. I recently stopped using Route 53 to serve DNS for 25 domains and wanted to save on the $150/year these were costing.
Amazon’s instructions for using the Route 53 Console to delete Record Sets and a Hosted Zone make it look simple. I started in the Route 53 Console clicking into a hosted zone, selecting each DNS record set (but not the NS or SOA ones), clicking delete, clicking confirm, going back a level, selecting the next domain, and so on. This got old quickly.
Being lazy, I decided to spend a lot more effort figuring out how to automate this process with the aws-cli, and pass the savings on to you.