Citation: Buttar, A.M.; Khalid, A.; Alenezi, M.; Akbar, M.A.; Rafi, S.; Gumaei, A.H.; Riaz, M.T. Optimization of DevOps Transformation for Cloud-Based Applications. Electronics 2023, 12, 357. https://doi.org/10.3390/ electronics12020357 Academic Editor: Antonio Brogi Received: 29 October 2022 Revised: 22 December 2022 Accepted: 4 January 2023 Published: 10 January 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). electronics Article Optimization of DevOps Transformation for Cloud-Based Applications Ahmed Mateen Buttar 1 , Adeel Khalid 1 , Mamdouh Alenezi 2 , Muhammad Azeem Akbar 3, * , Saima Rafi 4 , Abdu H. Gumaei 5 and Muhammad Tanveer Riaz 6,7 1 Department of Computer Science, University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Faisalabad 38000, Pakistan 2 Software Engineering and Disruptive Innovation (SEDI), College of Computer and Information Sciences, Prince Sultan University, Riyadh 11586, Saudi Arabia 3 Software Engineering Department, LUT University, 15210 Lahti, Finland 4 Department of Informatics and Systems, University of Murcia, 30100 Murcia, Spain 5 Department of Computer Science, College of Computer Engineering and Sciences, Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, Al-Kharj 11942, Saudi Arabia 6 Department of Mechanical, Mechatronics and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology Lahore Faisalabad Campus, Faisalabad 38000, Pakistan 7 Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering, Università di Bologna, 40136 Bologna, Italy * Correspondence: azeem.akbar@lut.fi or ahmedmatin@hotmail.com Abstract: Rapid software development is critical for meeting company objectives and competing more effectively in the competitive IoT infrastructure. DevOps is a growing technique that enables enterprises to provide high-quality software capabilities through automation, to improve team communication, and to increase efficiency across the software product lifecycle. Research problem: Due to the increased demand for new products and technologies, a huge overwork shifted on the organizations for introducing software with pace and to become stable to compete with others. Due to this, the majority of organizations prefer an automated system for product development and require cloud-based applications. The git version control system is used for version management and Docker is used to package code and provide libraries. AWS services are leveraged to deploy an application as a cloud. Jenkins is used as a CI/CD pipeline to manage various phases of development and to make the development process continuous. The ELK stack is used to monitor and visualize the execution of code. In light of the findings, DevOps is an efficient method for cloud application deployment and resource selection based on the relative importance of each optimized objective in terms of value parameters such as cost, memory, and CPU capacity, and that the method can be tailored to specific application requirements. The findings of this analysis indicate that an application can be deployed to the cloud using DevOps techniques. The proposed approach cost 60% less at full weight 1.0 and 11.3% less with no weight compared to the benchmark solution’s 15.078% Keywords: DevOps; cloud pipelines; continuous integration; continuous development 1. Introduction Modern technology contributes to our life by providing tools and it’s also helping us to improve our working conditions. Due to the growing demand for new products and technologies, businesses are distributing software at a faster speed and are more consistent than others. As a result, many businesses opt for an automated product development program and require cloud-based applications. As a solution, Cloud collaboration using DevOps makes organizations very powerful, as they not only facilitate the development of software products but also facilitate the implementation and control of the deployment process. DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). Leited et al. [1] described that “DevOps is a collaborative and multidis- ciplinary effort within an organization to automate continuous delivery of new software Electronics 2023, 12, 357. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12020357 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics