At first, a simple approach of deleting an account through completely external calls was considered as it required no changes to the system. All data would simply be deleted in the same way the actual user would, through the public ReST API. However, the downside was that it would use proxy resources and log everything when it didn't really need to. Also, it would likely need a dedicated server or two, just for issuing the delete requests.
A completely bottom-up approach was also considered, where the object and container servers would occasionally scan the data they held and check if the account was deleted, removing the data if so. The upside was the speed of reclamation with no impact on the proxies or logging, but the downside was that nearly 100% of the scanning would result in no action creating a lot of I/O load for no reason.
A more container server centric approach was also considered, where the account server would mark all the containers for deletion and the container servers would delete the objects in each container and then themselves. This has the benefit of still speedy reclamation for accounts with a lot of containers, but has the downside of a pretty big load spike. The process could be slowed down to alleviate the load spike possibility, but then the benefit of speedy reclamation is lost and what's left is just a more complex process. Also, scanning all the containers for those marked for deletion when the majority wouldn't be seemed wasteful. The db_replicator could do this work while performing its replication scan, but it would have to spawn and track deletion processes which seemed needlessly complex.
In the end, an account server centric approach seemed best, as described above.
