[Google employee] Yes, you can use TPUs in Compute Engine and GKE, among other places, for whatever you'd like. I just checked and the v6 are available.
Google employee here. Not the case. Cloud Run doesn't run on Kubernetes. It supports the Knative interface which is an OSS project for Kubernetes-based serverless. But Cloud Run is a fully managed service that sits directly atop Borg (https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/securing/security).
Arc looks cool, but it's only the control plane. They aren't dropping AKS into other environments. The compute is your responsibility. Anthos puts GKE in other places.
The KubeAcademy courses are nice little (free, no-reg) intros, and they have transcripts if you read faster than you watch: https://kube.academy/courses
For me, use Docker if you want k8s started up every time you start Docker, and easy ingress. I don't love having a cluster always running, so I'm keeping the k8s function off by default.
Use kind if you want multi-node clusters, and a production-like simulation of your environment.
Use minikube for a straightforward dev experience, where you have control over k8s version, resource allocation, and don't need meaningful configuration of the control plane.
Honestly, this rarely seems to come down to cloud pricing considerations. Rather, the goal for most shops who choose something like PCF is to (a) simplify onboarding and ongoing work of devs since they don't need to learn the nuances of each cloud IaaS, (b) stripe a single ops model across each infrastructure pool, which matters since no enterprise of size is using only one. People buy because they struggle to ship, and PCF helps these big companies put their focus back onto shipping software, not where or how it runs.
Good question. I work at Pivotal. PFS is a commercial, supported packaging of Riff (which adds dev and ops aspects to Knative). As opposed to running and supporting the OSS components on your own.
OP here. Good point on interruptions. In any setting, constant interruptions hurt productivity. But, I'd rather be interrupted with a question about a software feature than interrupted by a screaming child.