I spent most of the day on Saturday in Amazon’s HQ at “Cloudcamp,” an unconferece focused on cloud computing.  Microsoft, Amazon, RightScale and Rackspace/Mosso/Slicehost were the sponsors, but their presentations were enough to get a taste of their offerings while remaining mercifully brief.

I’d hoped to get an idea of how people were approaching scaling out websites using cloud services, how they were navigating the risk of lockin to something like SimpleDB against the difficulty of building their own scalable services and deploying them on something like EC2. I even led a well-attended session on the topic, but in the end, it was clear that cloud computing, is, at least for most of the attendees, something they are still scoping out.  A session on “success stories,” ended up being more about aspirations than actualization.

This disconnect between my expecations and the reality of the conference was itself pretty informative.

Last night I pounded out a long blog post with more of my impressions using my iPhone, but rather than posting it all in one monolithic post, I’m going to break it out into a bunch of smaller posts that will follow this one over the next few days.