There is a new meetup in the Triangle focused on Amazon Web Services - it's been meeting for a couple months and the previous talks have been great. The focus is on startups and companies sharing how they use AWS, what challenges they have had, and a decent amount of open discussion about architecture choices, issues, etc.
The next meeting is tomorrow night and we meet in Durham (just north of downtown, I swear it's mostly safe).
Also - free pizza and beer!