First things first: we're a Rocky Linux shop. About 100 instances, some bare metal, some VMs. A few local, a few at cloud providers like DigitalOcean. Held together by Ansible and kickstart installs.
Too often the discussion about RHEL clones like Rocky paints a picture of people like me as freeloaders. And some of the folks with a similar setup might be. But most small-time Linux admins I know are real open-source believers. I would really like to funnel some money into the platform we're using. First and foremost because it's the right thing to do, the people writing all that source code deserve it. But also because we need platform continuity, and being able to open a support case from time to time would also be great.
But it's really hard. I don't have the time and nerves to deal with the RHEL sales department, deal with the licensing, produce my own cloud images because DigitalOcean can't provide them, deal with our own internal purchasing process, deal with convincing my superiors that we need to.
Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers, work something out.