Divers and the huge amount of data produced by the Internet of Things (IoT) applications on the one hand, and inherent limitations of local equipment to handle these data, on the other hand, leads to present emerging closer technologies to the end‐users such as fog computing environment. Nevertheless, despite the numerous advantages of such an environment, it still needs state‐of‐the‐art approaches to cope with some inherent limitations. In the literature, resource placement strategies are generally proposed to address such problems, in which the IoT applications are mapped to fog nodes. However, despite its importance, different approaches attempt to enhance the overall system's performance and users' expectations: none of such approaches is satisfactory. In this article, to deploy IoT applications on fog nodes, an autonomic IoT service placement approach based on the gray wolf optimization scheme is proposed, enhancing the system's performance while considering execution costs. Besides, the autonomic concepts help make an appropriate automanagement system that fits better the fog environment's dynamic behavior. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the other approaches and converges to the solution in near‐optimal application deployment on fog nodes in respect of the performance of performing services that are 93.7%, the performance of the average waiting time for performed services that are 100%, the remaining services sent to an extra provisioned period that is zero.