I stepped off a plane after spending a week vacationing in Tucson and twelve hours later I found myself at CloudCamp Minneapolis. The unconference, held at the University of Minnesota, attracted about 100 attendees — vendors, developers, marketers, and job hunters. Most of the attendees were cloud consumers (users) that use the cloud to build and support applications.

My good friend Graeme Thickens posted flickr pictures from the event. Here’s some pics from Jeremy Mooney and some pics from Jared Volkl.

And here’s a good blog recap of the event provided by Jason Boche from the local Vmware Users Group.

I was pleased with the overall tone and tempo of the CloudCamp. People were genuinely interested in discussing the cloud and cloud computing from multiple perspectives. We had an interesting philosophical discussion moderated by George Reese regarding whether or not private clouds can be considered true clouds. George’s position was that if an organization owns the infrastructure they cannot claim to be using a cloud. Infrastructure is always someone else’s problem in this purist view. That begs the question can Microsoft claim to be using cloud computing if they leverage their own Azure platform to deliver SaaS. My belief is that cloud computing is a combination of infrastructure and business processes. The cloud computing infrastructure builder and user could be one and the same.