Imagine all the resource record sets in a zone listed out in front of you. Imagine them sorted lexicographically first by DNS name (with the labels reversed, like "com.amazon.www" for example), and secondarily, lexicographically by record type. This operation retrieves at most MaxItems resource record sets from this list, in order, starting at a position specified by the Name and Type arguments:

• If both Name and Type are omitted, this means start the results at the first RRSET in the HostedZone.
• If Name is specified but Type is omitted, this means start the results at the first RRSET in the list whose name is greater than or equal to Name.
• If both Name and Type are specified, this means start the results at the first RRSET in the list whose name is greater than or equal to Name and whose type is greater than or equal to Type.
• It is an error to specify the Type but not the Name.

Use ListResourceRecordSets to retrieve a single known record set by specifying the record set's name and type, and setting MaxItems = 1

To retrieve all the records in a HostedZone, first pause any processes making calls to ChangeResourceRecordSets. Initially call ListResourceRecordSets without a Name and Type to get the first page of record sets. For subsequent calls, set Name and Type to the NextName and NextType values returned by the previous response.

In the presence of concurrent ChangeResourceRecordSets calls, there is no consistency of results across calls to ListResourceRecordSets. The only way to get a consistent multi-page snapshot of all RRSETs in a zone is to stop making changes while pagination is in progress.

However, the results from ListResourceRecordSets are consistent within a page. If MakeChange calls are taking place concurrently, the result of each one will either be completely visible in your results or not at all. You will not see partial changes, or changes that do not ultimately succeed. (This follows from the fact that MakeChange is atomic)

The results from ListResourceRecordSets are strongly consistent with ChangeResourceRecordSets. To be precise, if a single process makes a call to ChangeResourceRecordSets and receives a successful response, the effects of that change will be visible in a subsequent call to ListResourceRecordSets by that process.