DevOps originated in the context of the agile development aims to enable the continuous deployment of software applications in small releases. Most recently, organizations are taking a significant interest in adopting DevOps for automatically deploying IoT applications to multi-cloud. The interest is there; however, the challenge is how to achieve this. A new DevOps reference architecture (DRA) framework has been iteratively developed to address this challenge. This paper presents the updated DRA framework and its empirical evaluation results. The empirical evaluation is composed of two phases: (1) industry case study evaluation conducted in an IT organization, and (2) industry field survey with a cohort of experts in software engineering. The evaluation aims to determine the applicability and novelty of the DRA framework. The evaluation results indicate that the DRA is fit for its intended purpose and is expected to help both researchers and practitioners. The DRA uses can architect complex design models for the purpose of supporting the automated development stage of software applications. Software engineers can implement the DRA models for deploying complex IoT application to the multi-cloud environment in the current organization development parameters.