Automatic updating of newer JRE on GNU/Linux

Oracle doesn't maintain a Yum repository to point to, but you could create one locally and populate it with new releases. Then, point your hosts at your internal repository and have a cron job that regularly updates from it. This has the benefit of using the alternatives system to setup the environment variables for a desired release. In most cases, JAVA_HOME would stay pointing at the default location which is a symlink setup by alternatives.

In a previous job, we had some apps exported via NFS. And I used to symlink the latest version to "latest." The JAVA_HOME can default to this path. This meant one place to update but allowed end users to rollback or override it as needed in their own environment.