Fractional Reserve High Availability Using Cloud Command Interception

An approach is provided to provide a high availability (HA) cloud environment. In the approach, an active cloud environment is established in one cloud computing environment using a primary set of resources and a passive cloud environment is established in another cloud computing environment, with the passive cloud environment using fewer resources than are used by the active cloud environment. A workload is serviced by the active cloud environment. While servicing the workload, cloud commands are processed that alter the primary set of resources and the commands are stored in a queue. When a failure of the active cloud environment occurs, the workload is serviced by the passive cloud environment in the second cloud computing environment and the cloud commands stored in the queue are used to alter the resources used by the passive cloud environment.