Out of curiosity, why do you need RHEL or subscription from Canonical for the production Kubernetes setup? What's wrong with plain Ubuntu or CentOS?
Red Hat OpenShift on RHEL, Pivotal Container Service on Ubuntu, Red Hat’s nextgen CoreOS based Kubernetes, Canonical’s Charmed Kubernetes Distribution on Ubuntu, etc. all have different config management , install, upgrade, patching mechanisms that vary from Ansible, to Terraform, to BOSH, to Juju. Some handle PXE bare metal, some don’t. Etc.
There usually are free / no pay versions of the above that you can use self-supported, but then you’ll also need to coordinate your own upgrades and use community forums for q&a rather than being able to contractually have someone looking out for you and answering your questions.
If you’d prefer to avoid lock-in, All of that plumbing would otherwise have to be configured and scripted yourself with your chosen toolchain plus the newer “k8s small tools” like Kubeadm, Kops, Kube-spray, etc.
As the old saying goes, open source is only free (as in beer) if your time has no value.
Yes but in the case of RedHat specifically those goals are not achieved.