compliance i suspect. If you're working in compliance heavy industries, then RHEL certification is signed off on.

Any other linux (including Rocky Linux) will need to be painfully certified.

That makes sense, but wouldn't you expect al2022 to reach compliance before Rocky?

I just deal with iso cert, so not clear on possible requirements

why would amazon linux be a suitable substitute for genuine RHEL if compliance is an issue?

If compliance is an issue, I doubt whether there is such a thing as a "suitable substitute". Certainly none of the commercial applications I interact with accepted CentOS as an alternative to RHEL, so they certainly won't allow a substitution for Rocky or Alma.

While AL2022 isn't a drop-in RHEL alternative, it seems much more likely that vendors will accept it as a commercially supported install base given that it is a first-class citizen on the biggest cloud.

amazon linux is BETTER than rhel in that regard.

AWS has a secret weapon in compliance - its called AWS Artifact. most compliance certifying agencies will pass-through accept AWS Artifact reports.

No technical reason. Just sheer Amazon muscle i guess.

https://aws.amazon.com/artifact/

We used that for PCI compliance when I was working at Whole Foods. That only covers their part of the shared responsibility model.

There’s still a whole boatload of things that still need to be covered which do not fall on their side of the shared responsibility model.