After a few months commissioning spent scanning the two ecliptic poles,
Gaia, the European Space Agency cornerstone mission successfully launched
on 19 December 2013, entered into nominal mission in July 2014,
and it has been regularly scanning the sky in every direction
to a faint limit of G=20.7 mag since then.

Gaia is expected to observe thousands of variable sources.
Discovery of several thousands (~ 9,000) new Galactic Cepheids and
measure of parallax for more than a thousand of them, along with thousands
of the Cepheids in the Magellanic Clouds, are expected from Gaia.

Similarly, Gaia is expected to observe about 70,000 RR Lyrae stars in the
Galactic halo and  about 15,000-40,000 in the MW bulge (most of which will
be new discoveries) and to provide parallax measurements with a few
$\mu$as uncertainty (standard error) for those brighter than V ~ 12
mag.
This will allow the absolute calibration via parallaxes of these "primary"
standard candles and, in turn, a total re-assessment of the whole cosmic
distance ladder.

Status and activities of the satellite since  launch will be briefly
presented with emphasis on preliminary results obtained for RR Lyrae stars
and Cepheids observed during the commissioning phase and in light of the
first Gaia data release which is less than one year away.