Released 25th April, Gaia DR2 hosted in the ESA Gaia archive is leading a paradigm shift in the way astronomers access and process astronomical data in ESA archives. An unprecedented active community of thousands of scientists is making use of the latest IVOA protocols and services (TAP, DataLink) in this archive, benefitting of remote execution and persistent, authenticated, server side services to speed up data exploration and analysis. The availability of a dedicated Python library for this purpose is connecting the archive data to new data processing workflows. The infrastructure serving this data has been upgraded from DR1, now making use of replication, clustering, high performance hardware and scalable data distribution systems in new ways for ESA astronomical archives. VO orientation of the archive has been strengthened by the provision of Time Series in DR2 through use of a VO aware format and protocol. In order to cover the overwhelming data volume of DR3, new services will be offered to the general astronomical community. Remote execution of code, with notebook services and access to data mining infrastructure as a service are the topics under development. In this talk, it will be described how the current archive does enable to analyse Gaia data more effectively linked to how this is changing data analysis workflows. The infrastructure created for this purpose will be described, and the architecture and plans under implementation for DR3.
Link to PDF (may not be available yet): O10-6.pdf