Exercise 1: Recommending a Provider for a Microsoft-Invested Team — Possible Solution
====================================================================

Recommendation: Azure.

Justification, working through the chapter's decision framework:

1. EXISTING ECOSYSTEM INVESTMENT. Per the chapter, this is the first
   question to ask, and it's decisive here: a team already deeply
   invested in Microsoft 365 and Active Directory gets a real,
   concrete integration advantage on Azure specifically -- identity
   federation (Chapter 6's SSO material) with an existing Active
   Directory setup is considerably more natural on Azure than
   rebuilding equivalent integration against AWS or GCP from scratch.

2. TEAM'S EXISTING EXPERTISE. A team that already works daily inside
   the Microsoft ecosystem likely has more existing familiarity with
   Microsoft's own tooling, admin concepts, and general operating
   model than with AWS's or GCP's consoles and terminology -- reducing
   the retraining cost the chapter specifically calls out as a real,
   often underweighted factor.

3. SPECIFIC SERVICE NEEDS. Nothing in the scenario (a small internal
   tool) suggests a need for GCP's particular data/ML strength or any
   other provider-specific capability that would outweigh points 1
   and 2 -- there's no competing signal pulling toward a different
   provider.

4. COMPLIANCE/RESIDENCY and 5. EXISTING MULTI-CLOUD REALITY are not
   mentioned in the scenario, so neither introduces a constraint that
   would override the clear signal from points 1 and 2.

Since this is a small, internal, relatively low-stakes tool (not a
scenario with a strong opposing pull from compliance requirements or a
GCP-specific technical need), the ecosystem-investment and
team-expertise factors are allowed to dominate the decision cleanly.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
------------------------------
This works through the chapter's own five-item framework in order,
showing that the first two questions alone already point decisively at
Azure for this specific scenario, and explicitly checks the remaining
three factors to confirm none of them introduce a competing pull --
rather than jumping straight to Azure without demonstrating the
reasoning process the chapter's framework is meant to provide.