React “Server Components” will affect the bottom line…

This is a look at Facebook’s new concept “server components” from a cost perspective.

TLDR

Server components could help us reduce wasted expenditure when using cloud resources.

You can read all about “Server Components” here.

Computers are getting bigger

We all think of the colossal computing power in our smart phone, the tiny device that sits in our pockets but behind the scene, computers are getting bigger.

These cloud data centres are massive.

If we have a $4000 server sitting idle 20% of the time we have wasted a few hundred dollars, if the data centre is idle 20% of the time, that’s millions of dollars.

Cloud computing companies have a waste issue; some of the capacity they built is not being used. In order to shift this unused capacity, cloud computing companies are discounting this unused compute power. It is sold or given away as “Serverless Functions”.

This gives us the opportunity to run our functions in the inexpensive compute time offered by these providers. It provides us with good value for money computing power. We can fine tune what functions to run on the server and what functions to run on the client. Squeezing more value from our ever growing cloud budgets.

It’s early stages for this technology, and there is a lot of development needed to make the concept ready for production. However I think this could be one of the revolutionary jumps in commercial software development.

We are keenly watching how Vercel and NextJS implement this concept.