The News: Last Thursday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon Braket, a fully managed AWS service that provides a development environment to help customers explore and design quantum algorithms. Amazon Braket helps developers and researchers get started with quantum computing, providing development tools, simulators, and access to a diverse set of quantum hardware. Read more at Amazon.
AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon Braket Quantum Computing Tool
Analyst Take: Amazon Braket was announced eight months ago at Amazon’s Re:Ignite event. Braket is a fully-managed AWS service that Amazon markets as a service that will spur innovation across the entire quantum community, allowing developers, researchers, and scientists to experiment with computers from quantum hardware providers. Amazon Braket can be used to test and troubleshoot quantum algorithms on simulated quantum computers running on computing resources in AWS to help them verify their implementation. Customers can also use Amazon Braket to run their quantum algorithms on their choice of quantum processors based on different technologies, including systems from D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti.
Benefits of Amazon Braket
Here’s a short overview of some of the benefits of Amazon Bracket —
Quick start: You can get started quickly, using a single environment to build, test, and run quantum algorithms without having to set up infrastructure.
Experimentation: Amazon Bracket’s cross platform dev tools make it easy to experiment without having to learn different development environments. They’ve made the process of finding the quantum tech that’s the best fit for you as easy as possible.
Help! Amazon’s Quantum Solutions Lab connects users with experts from both AWS and AWS partners, providing help when you need it.
Hybrid/Classical: Amazon Braket allows you to build and run quantum algos that combine quantum apps and processes with processes (like optimization, for example) running on classical computers, helping with error mitigation.
Integrated cloud experience: Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of Amazon Braket is that Amazon serves this up as a part of its AWS cloud service.
How Amazon Braket Works
Below is a diagram showing at a glance how Amazon Braket works —
How Quantum Apps Prepare Users for the Future
Quantum apps most definitely can help prepare users for the future, which is the goal with Amazon Braket. From molecular simulation that helps solve problems in physics and chemistry, with the ability to lead to the design of new materials and catalysts, drug discoveries, and the exploration of high-temp superconductors, quantum is the future.
Quantum can be used to help address optimization problems that are prevalent in a number of industries, including financial services, supply chain logistics, and telecommunications, that are difficult for classical computers to handle.
Quantum machine learning, like machine learning in general, allows systems to learn from data on an ongoing basis, identifying patterns and making autonomous decisions. Scalable error-corrected quantum has great potential.
Quantum is Good Business, for Amazon and AWS Customers
In summary, the Amazon Braket offering is appealing on a number of fronts. I especially like the fact that both the simulated and quantum hardware jobs are managed through a unified development experience, and customers pay only for the compute resources used. Amazon reports that Fidelity Investments, Volkswagen, Enel, University of Waterloo, Rahko, and Qu & Co are among the companies already using Amazon Braket is now available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), and US West (Oregon) AWS Regions, with more regions planned for the future. You can learn more about Amazon Braket here, and sign up for a free account to access the AWS Free tier here.
Daniel Newman, my colleague here at Futurum, covered the Amazon Re:Invent event in late 2019 and mentioned that while we’re in the early days of quantum, we’re seeing the major players in cloud and computing stake their respective claims to using quantum to help customers solve their most complex challenges. Amazon’s launch of Braket enables the use of quantum computing in the Amazon AWS cloud — and that’s good business. Good for Amazon and good for AWS customers. You can read Daniel’s full article here: AWS Addresses Its Place in Quantum at Re:Invent 2019.
Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice.
Other insights from the Futurum team:
AWS Addresses Its Place in Quantum at re:Invent 2019
VW And AWS Open Industrial Cloud Project to Partners
Amazon Web Services Increases Availability of AWS IoT SiteWise for Industrial Customers
Image Credit: Whizlabs
Author Information
Sarah most recently served as the head of industry research for Oracle. Her experience working as a research director and analyst extends across multiple focus areas including AI, big data and analytics, cloud infrastructure and operations, OSS/BSS, customer experience, IoT, SDN/NFV, mobile enterprise, cable/MSO issues, and managed services. Sarah has also conducted primary research of the retail, banking, financial services, healthcare, higher ed, manufacturing, and insurance industries and her research has been cited by media such as Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, VentureBeat, ReCode, and various trade publications, such as eMarketer and The Financial Brand.
