It doesn’t take Albert Einstein to figure out startups and SaaS are a tough combination. Customers want a rock solid, reliable hosting infrastructure — and most startups are still trying to figure out which colo least resembles a yo-yo.

For the last few months I’ve been delighted by our progress in developing the Coupa SaaS infrastructure. We can now offer near-instantaneous build-up and tear-down of Coupa eProcurement instances. It’s neither single nor multi-tenant, but instead a hybrid that we intend to talk about at a later date.

Currently we use our infrastructure for the online enterprise demos which have grown so popular of late. (And hey, they absolutely are a great way to check out our latest and greatest, complete with rich demo data.)

Demand has been strong enough on the demo front to have us searching for a solution that would enable better burst data through-put and a greater ability to scale to a higher volume of customers. So we’ve been evaluating the Amazon EC2 service.

It’s far from perfect but it’s a really great concept. We gain the flexibility to expand and contract usage without a large fixed cost. But better still, Coupa’s SaaS customers gain the peace of mind of knowing the same fault-tolerant, reliable infrastructure that powers Amazon.com is working for them. Cool beans.