  Gaia is an ESA cornerstone mission, which was successfully launched December
2013 and commenced operations in July 2014. Within the Gaia Data Processing and
Analysis consortium, Coordination Unit 7 (CU7) is responsible for the
variability analysis of over a billion celestial sources and nearly 4 billion
associated time series (photometric, spectrophotometric, and spectroscopic),
encoding information in over 800 billion observations during the 5 years of the
mission, resulting in a petabyte scale analytical problem. In this article, we
briefly describe the solutions we developed to address the challenges of time
series variability analysis: from the structure for a distributed data-oriented
scientific collaboration to architectural choices and specific components used.
Our approach is based on Open Source components with a distributed, partitioned
database as the core to handle incrementally: ingestion, distributed
processing, analysis, results and export in a constrained time window.
