All:
I am pretty new to React from AngularJS. In AngularJS, there is service dependency inject which can provide a service instance to do data fetching, processing, etc
I prefer to create a service in another file that exposes the 'public' functions through module.exports.
e.g.
module.exports = { foo: function(){ return bar; } }
which is then referenced by Components using
import myService from './routetoservice/myService'