A cloud computing environment may use a virtualization layer within a stateless cloud computing process to capture, store, and retrieve state information generated by a stateful application executing within the process. The virtualization layer may monitor various state storage systems to identify changes to stateful items and store the stateful items in a state storage mechanism. The virtualization layer may intercept and redirect calls to the stateful items stored in the state storage mechanism. A cloud computing manager may start and stop the stateless cloud computing process, and may recover the state and resume executing the application.