Trials and Tribulations of Developing Hybrid Quantum-Classical Microservices Systems

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.