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Trials and Tribulations of Developing Hybrid Quantum-Classical Microservices Systems

Javier Rojo, David Valencia, Javier Berrocal, Enrique Moguel, Jose Garcia-Alonso, Juan Manuel Murillo Rodriguez

TL;DR

This paper investigates the practical challenges of integrating quantum computation into service-oriented architectures by implementing a quantum microservice for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and deploying it on Amazon Braket. It analyzes two quantum architectures—adiabatic (quantum annealing) and gate-based (Quantum Phase Estimation)—and encapsulates each as a microservice endpoint to assess agnosticism, composability, and maintainability in hybrid systems. The evaluation highlights current hardware-specific coupling, variable latency, and cost concerns, underscoring the need for quantum service engineering concepts such as abstraction, orchestration, and QoS-aware scheduling. The work provides a benchmark for the distance between the present state of quantum services and the ideal, reusable quantum service engineering paradigm, guiding future research toward more flexible and scalable quantum microservices.

Abstract

Quantum computing holds great promise to solve to problems where classical computers cannot reach. To the point where it already arouses the interest of both scientific and industrial communities. Thus, it is expected that hybrid systems will start to appear where quantum software interacts with classical systems. Such coexistence can be fostered by service computing. Unfortunately, the way in which quantum code can be offered as a service still misses out on many of the potential benefits of service computing. This paper takes the traveling salesman problem, and tackles the challenge of giving it an implementation in the form of a quantum microservice. Then it is used to detect which of the benefits of service computing are lost in the process. The conclusions help to measure the distance between the current state of technology and the state that would be desirable in order to have a real quantum service engineering.

Trials and Tribulations of Developing Hybrid Quantum-Classical Microservices Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the practical challenges of integrating quantum computation into service-oriented architectures by implementing a quantum microservice for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and deploying it on Amazon Braket. It analyzes two quantum architectures—adiabatic (quantum annealing) and gate-based (Quantum Phase Estimation)—and encapsulates each as a microservice endpoint to assess agnosticism, composability, and maintainability in hybrid systems. The evaluation highlights current hardware-specific coupling, variable latency, and cost concerns, underscoring the need for quantum service engineering concepts such as abstraction, orchestration, and QoS-aware scheduling. The work provides a benchmark for the distance between the present state of quantum services and the ideal, reusable quantum service engineering paradigm, guiding future research toward more flexible and scalable quantum microservices.

Abstract

Quantum computing holds great promise to solve to problems where classical computers cannot reach. To the point where it already arouses the interest of both scientific and industrial communities. Thus, it is expected that hybrid systems will start to appear where quantum software interacts with classical systems. Such coexistence can be fostered by service computing. Unfortunately, the way in which quantum code can be offered as a service still misses out on many of the potential benefits of service computing. This paper takes the traveling salesman problem, and tackles the challenge of giving it an implementation in the form of a quantum microservice. Then it is used to detect which of the benefits of service computing are lost in the process. The conclusions help to measure the distance between the current state of technology and the state that would be desirable in order to have a real quantum service engineering.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 13 sections, 1 equation, 7 figures, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Traveling Salesman Problem
  4. Formulation of the TSP problem
  5. TSP on Quantum Computing Architectures
  6. TSP on Adiabatic Quantum Computing
  7. TSP on Gate-based Quantum Computing
  8. Quantum microservices
  9. Adiabatic quantum computing endpoint
  10. Gate-based quantum computing endpoint
  11. Quantum-Classical Hybrid Microservices System Trial Evaluation
  12. Related works
  13. Conclusion and future works

Figures (7)

  • Figure 1: Fragment of code for the TSP using quantum annealing
  • Figure 2: Input for the annealing-based solution of the TSP
  • Figure 3: Output of the annealing-based solution of the TSP
  • Figure 4: Gate-based QPE algorithm to solve the TSP
  • Figure 5: Deployment architecture of the TSP hybrid microservice
  • ...and 2 more figures