[omniglottal]

If you spin up a bunch of cattle, your automation and testing is going to want to be for your specific use case to get the meat from them - the moment you need to waste even 10 minutes dealing with (even uncertainties around) subscription management to name and enumerate each of your "pets", then you know the vendor doesn't care about your real-life problems and will persist in generating roadblocks to fulfill their business requirements while ignoring yours. Where an option exists to do the CI/CD/testing/prototyping with an airgap or where no communication with the mothership is required, and no requests for licenses/subscriptions are needed for you to do your job, that option begins to look very appealing. Sure, you may get a bunch of free dev licenses - but I believe the integration cost of using them costs more engineering effort than option #2: not bothering with any engineering integration effort to fulfil another business's requirements while you should instead be working on your own.

[jjnoakes]

I see where you are coming from, but I've found it beneficial to my business to trade the minor inconvenience of free subscription management for the stability and long-term support for RHEL.

I get that others may not like that trade-off, but I was mostly curious if there were any specific reasons that would tip my personal scales. Sounds like there aren't.