This! Kubernetes in some ways was a shot in AWS’s direction. It gives companies a reason to switch to Google. GKE is still far more stable and mature than EKS.
AWS still beats gcp in most other ways though (imho), so it’s far from a slam dunk. But it has opened up a door for Google.
Interesting read on this topic by Stratechery - https://stratechery.com/2016/how-google-cloud-platform-is-ch...
But they also figured out that making their free-as-in-beer tools also free-as-in-freedom open source, they'd lift all clouds and not just their own.
As the dominant player, Amazon loses from anything that reduces vendor lock-in. That's why precious little of Amazon's cloud tooling is released on Github.
With Kubernetes, Google made the the opposite calculation. As a challenger, it's to Google's benefit to open-source cloud tooling like Kubernetes. Even though their competitors benefit, Google benefits more from standardized tools that reduce switching costs.