Nodes can contain other nodes, called nested nodes, and they can also have artifacts deployed on them.
Typically, a node has a name that describes the piece of hardware that it represents.
As the following figure illustrates, a node is displayed as a 3-dimensional rectangle that contains the name of the node and the node icon.
In diagrams, compartments display information about the attributes, deployed elements, nested nodes, and internal structure of the node.
When you develop software for a distributed system, you can model the different components of the system as nodes in a deployment diagram. For example, an e-commerce application might have some software that runs on the client's computer and some that runs on a public server. These different computer systems are represented by nodes. The artifacts that each node deploys can be listed in the Deploy compartment or shown explicitly with deployment relationships.
As the following figure illustrates, you can model the client/server system with two nodes that are connected by a communication path.
Stereotyped nodes
A node can be stereotyped to represent a specific type of hardware. Assigning a stereotype to a node and replaces the default cube shape with a shape that resembles the system component. For example, the following figure shows how a node is stereotyped to represent a mainframe computer.
As the following figure illustrates, you can model the same client/server system, which has two stereotyped nodes that are connected by a communication path, by using shapes that represent the specific system components.
