An Empirical Evaluation of the DevOps Reference Architecture for Multi-Cloud IoT-Applications

DevOps originated in the context of the agile methodology context to enable the continuous deployment and delivery of software applications in small releases. Organizations are taking a significant interest in adopting DevOps for deploying IoT applications to multi-cloud. The interest is there; however, there is no sufficient information on how to adopt DevOps to address this challenge effectively. A new DevOps reference architecture (DRA) framework has been developed to address this challenge. The DRA enables the automation of the IoT application deployment to a multi-cloud environment. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of the DRA framework. The empirical evaluation is composed of two phases: 1) Industry case study evaluation conducted at an IT organization, and 2) Industry field survey offered online to a cohort of experts in the area of software engineering. The evaluation aims to determine the applicability and novelty of the DRA framework mainly. The evaluation results indicate that the DRA is fit for its intended purpose and is expected to help both researchers and practitioners to architect and implement DevOps for complex IoT application deployment to multi-cloud environments.