Registered domain using Route 53, using Cloudflare for DNS, having problems configuring DNS correctly

For poor souls who might have had the same question: you don't need to add NS RRs in Route53 in the hosted zone section. You need to go to your Registered Domains, click the domain you want to modify, and then Add/Edit the name servers there.

Those are the domain NSes, and are associated with the registrar, they are different from the ones delegated inside the zone itself.

When I did this the update was almost instant, the AWS data center is probably next to the Google one 🙂

"I read the other ServerFault question but I'm not sure how I should proceed. Should I add A entries in Route53 for the CloudFlare name servers?"

Just to clarify...no. That will cause issues.

"And now it gets tricky. I want to use Google Apps for email. I've been trying to verify my domain with them and I can't get it to work. I've tried TXT RR verification, HTML meta tag, HTML file upload, nothing works.

My guess is that you may have had a Google verification record in your DNS settings marked with our proxy (orange cloud)on the record, which will cause issues when Google attempts to verify. Verification records should be marked as a grey cloud in your CloudFlare DNS settings.