Cost Conscious Garbage Collection

A computer program product disposed upon a computer readable medium, the computer program product comprising computer program instructions that, when executed, cause a computer to carry out the steps of:

• selecting one or more storage classes from among a plurality of storage classes of one or more data storage services for storing one or more data objects;
• determining, for the one or more data objects stored in the one or more data storage services, an estimated quantity of data eligible for garbage collection;
• and
• initiating, after determining that resources for continued storage of the one or more data objects exceed resources for performing garbage collection on the data eligible for garbage collection and based upon an expected cost savings based on storage cost savings from performing garbage collection compared against access cost expenses for performing one or more cloud-based operations to perform the garbage collection, garbage collection on the one or more data objects in the one or more data storage services.

A method comprising:

• storing one or more data objects in a cloud-based data storage service;
• identifying data eligible for garbage collection among the one or more data objects;
• and
• initiating, after determining that resources for continued storage of the data eligible for garbage collection exceed resources for performing garbage collection on the data eligible for garbage collection and based upon an expected cost savings based on storage cost savings from performing garbage collection compared against access cost expenses for performing one or more cloud-based operations to perform the garbage collection, garbage collection on the data eligible for garbage collection in the one or more data storage services.