Deployment diagrams

Deployment diagrams provide a visual representation of a system's hardware and software. Physical hardware components are illustrated, along with the particular software components that are on them. The hardware components are represented as nodes, and software is represented as an execution environment.

The nodes are drawn as three-dimensional rectangles and represent hardware for a software object, such as a database. As illustrated in the following example, associations are annotated with lines marked with the type of communication protocol used. Our example shows TCP/IP as the communication type:

Deployment diagrams can be more involved than the example provided here. Our example does, however, provide sufficient insight for you to progress through the proceeding chapters.