Enabling continuous deployment techniques for quantum services

Early advances in quantum computing have provided new opportunities to tackle intricate problems in diverse areas such as cryptography, optimization, and simulation. However, current methodologies employed in quantum computing often require, among other things, a broad understanding of quantum hardware and low-level programming languages, posing challenges to software developers in effectively creating and implementing quantum services. This study advocates the adoption of software engineering principles in quantum computing, thereby establishing a higher level of hardware abstraction that allows developers to focus on application development. With this proposal, developers can design and deploy quantum services with less effort, which is similar to the facilitation provided by service-oriented computing for the development of conventional software services. This study introduces a continuous deployment strategy adapted to the development of quantum services that covers the creation and deployment of such services. For this purpose, an extension of the OpenAPI specification is proposed, which allows the generation of services that implement quantum algorithms. The proposal was validated through the creation of an application programming interface with diverse quantum algorithm implementations and evaluated through a survey of various developers and students who were introduced to the tool with positive results.