CloudLinux may be an option, if I’m reading correctly that they’ll be maintaining an Open Source and free fork of RHEL going forward (historically, they had quirky licensing that I had concerns with). Way back when CentOS took months to release version 6, we added Scientific Linux support (and even ran our own servers on Scientific for several years) to the installer and repos and such…as long as CloudLinux is extremely similar and binary-compatible, we can probably just add OS detection and some minor tweaks and make it go.
Actually, this change also will break our assumptions about RHEL, so we’ll have to deal with that (we don’t have a lot of users on RHEL, but a much higher proportion of our paying customers use it, so we have to support it). I don’t actually develop on RHEL anymore…I used to have RHEL development VMs for all of our supported versions, but CentOS was so close that it turned out to be unnecessary, I just needed to get the repo names right and it always Just Worked. So, it’s definitely piling a lot of new work on us…and we’ll probably have to find another distro that is a straight ahead rebuild of RHEL. Whether that will be CloudLinux or RockyLinux is currently unknown, but I’m glad it’s on the horizon.
As an aside, IBM is really shooting themselves in the foot with this move. I don’t see how it can do anything other than reduce their influence and marketshare on servers. Short term gains in revenue, but long-term loss. I think they’ve built a time-bomb that will effectively destroy Red Hat Enterprise Linux within a few years.