Cloudcamp San Francisco, the first in a series of events centered on cloud computing, took place on June 24. If the roughly 300 attendees at this informal industry meet-up are any indication, cloud computing is a popular and rapidly growing subject.

“Based on attendance at recent Amazon cloud conferences I was expecting maybe 100 people”, said CloudCamp instigator and Enomalism co-founder Reuven Cohen, “this is an amazing turnout after only 3 weeks of planning.”

The open format included 28 attendee-generated topics spread across several breakouts. After an unsuccessful but popular attempt to define cloud computing, the audience then tackled more meaty subjects such as cloud portability, integration, security, and standards.

“There was lots of good debate about the need for open interoperability standards between clouds of various types” said Adrian Otto from Mosso Research and Development, “but nobody has the full set of answers yet. It’s complicated and will take time to figure out.”

We’re still early in the cloud industry, so it’s no surprise that most of the participants were vendors. But most left with a new appreciation of how people were using their products or services. “Users are looking for pretty simple functionality, like easy provisioning of single instances”, said Ed Goldberg, Sr. Software Engineer from RightScale. “I’ve been focusing on more complex problems that users aren’t dealing with yet.”

Even industry heavyweights like Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, took the time to network with the rest of the cloud ecosystem his company seeded with the launch of S3 in early 2006.

Overall, there weren’t a lot of clear answers or immediate results, but the attendance clearly shows organizers struck a chord with the emerging cloud computing sector.

The open bar probably had nothing to do with it.