Seems like attacking Google would be a bad target for street cred as compared to govt websites.
Now we need the SEO content side: "How we hit Google with 398M RPS".
"... you can do this manually, but our product makes it as easy as a sign up and API call. Talk to us about pricing. [Python API example].
What I'm not sure of is why Google published this. I can't figure out what their strategy is here. We never published about the attacks we absorbed because we didn't want them to know our capabilities.
Unless this is marketing for Google Cloud?
If you read the article, there are plenty of marketing remarks in there to get you to use Google Cloud
That seems likely here if they're claiming this is the largest DDOS ever.
Besides publicity, there is also link to a list of advisories that may be of interest to other cloud operators and users.
We? Netflix or Reddit? I know for a fact that Amazon doesn't.
At eBay/PayPal we filed patents on our DDOS shield, since it was as far as we knew the first one to exist, but that was about the only public information on it.
At reddit and Netflix we didn't actually have to deal with it because AWS just absorbed (or mitigated) it before it ever hit us. We only had to deal with L7 attacks, which we had shields in place for.
As for why to write about it, it's a new type of attack that resulted in almost an order of magnitude increase in attack size. That's interesting and newsworthy by itself, and publishing a concrete number gives people an idea of the size of the problem and the trendlines.
This is also something that needed a CVE, so it was going to be very public anyway. If nothing is written about it, at a minimum Cloud customers will be flooding their support reps with questions about whether the vulnerability applies to them.