If I am understanding cloud talk correctly, each application I want to run will be set up with its own environment. Since the two apps I will start with use MySQL/MariaDB, I believe I should set that up first?
It seems that there are multiple ways to set up Maria DB: I can create the environment and choose the MariaDB image in the Application Server section OR create the environment using the Docker Engine topology and then use the docker commands to run the MariaDB image.
It’s possible to have more than one “node” in an environment. For example you can have an Apache node and a MySQL node associated with a single environment. That being said if you have several apps using MySQL it would be more cost effective to run a single MariaDB env and use it for anything that needs a database.
For your second question no need to use Docker in this case. In the background it actually is containers running all the different nodes but in this case if there is an official image like there is for MariaDB built into the software I recommend using it as the cloud environment will give you more options specific to handling databases and highlight Config files for you as opposed to generic Docker nodes.