I am not a ddos mitigation expert, but I am under the impression that the remedies you mention are only going to help with relatively small attacks. It is very

I am not a ddos mitigation expert, but I am under the impression that the remedies you mention are only going to help with relatively small attacks. It is very inexpensive to buy enough DDOS capacity to saturate a whole server's CPU just decoding requests. Caching and rate limiting aren't going to help you much then. If you're a serious target these days, you basically need to have your services behind one of the big solutions. Rolling your own is far too expensive for any but the largest players. Cloudflare, GCE, and I'm sure many others offer ddos mitigation for grownups.