What's the difference between an Application Service Provider and Cloud computing?

"An application service provider is not going to provide you with console access to discrete (virtual) machines. A cloud provider might, a la Rackspace's Cloud Servers.
A typical ""cloud"" provider allows you to spin up/spin down computing capacity as-needed, often through an API. You then pay for those resources on an as-needed basis.
The idea of the ""cloud"" is a move away from dedicated managed hosting. An Application Service Provider may well use ""cloud"" type systems to drive their operations. Or, they may not. ASP vs cloud is not an either/or proposition.
Cloud systems are generally defined by being highly virtualized and highly scalable. You don't talk in terms of processors but in terms of computing units.

There are many separate ideas that tend to be categorized under cloud computing, including Software as a Service (what you might term an Application Service Provider), Utility Computing (scalable computing power that you pay by use, like a power bill, rather than in large discrete chunks), Platform as a Service (providing the hardware and underlying software stack of a solution, but not the application itself...a slightly lower level than SaaS), and others.

Basically, there may or may not be a difference. These two terms are not directly comparable, and many ASPs meet one of several definitions of cloud computing providers."