CoLiTec Virtual Observatory Platform for the Cloud Computing Analysis of Light Curves for the Variable Stars

A growing of the cloud services and resources capabilities allow moving the desktop software/applications to the servers/clouds/clusters. In this paper we have presented a brief description and several aspects related to the cloud computing, Virtual Observatory (VO) and Software as a Service (SaaS) in astronomy, reviewed them, and provided some major approaches of their realization in scope of the Collection Light Technology (CoLiTec) project as the SaaS called "CoLiTec Virtual Observatory Platform". We have presented a realization of the developed mathematical and computational methods related to the light curve creation of variable stars incapsulated into the CoLiTecVS (CoLiTec Variable Stars) desktop software as a new Software as a Service approach with the graphical user interface (GUI) in the cloud with web access and visualization. All processing stages are performed on the backend and end user has access to the web interface only. The CoLiTec Virtual Observatory Platform was successfully tested on the astronomical data with a lot of investigated variable stars of the different observatories in Ukraine, Slovakia and Thailand using the different types of telescopes and observational conditions.