> public renewable energy footprint
When electricity is the sole marginal cost of keeping a node powered up from your pool of available machines that can be powered on and off on-demand, these particular words actually mean a lot.
I think the point is that GCP can afford to keep some nodes online even when they don't belong to anyone and just eat the cost. (Eg. those renewable resources like wind and the sun just don't cost anything, so why not spend the energy that is generated from them.)
I'm sure I'm not giving AWS enough credit. Seeing that Google pretty much invented Kubernetes, their cost to come 'up to speed' enough to provide a managed version of it is effectively nil. Their renewable energy is not the only source of so-called "extra capacity," either... they honestly should have had no trouble staffing a team to build out and promote GKE without siphoning off much more than a nominal amount of developer capacity from other offerings that may need it as well.
If it's true that when AWS announced they'd be offering EKS last November, they only had a team of 5 allocated to it, then I guess they deserve a lot of credit for the progress they've made in about 8 months.
That cost to AWS is non-zero (I'm also pretty sure the team has grown and is larger than 5 devs now) and they have every reasonable basis to attempt to recoup it. I don't think many AWS customers will disagree. The adopters who have known they need it for a year or more, many who are happily locked into the ecosystem already, will certainly be lining up to pay for this now.