Provides a crisp abstraction of something drawn from the vocabulary of the hardware in your solution domain.
Is decomposed only to the level necessary to communicate your intent to the reader.
Exposes only those attributes and operations that are relevant to the domain you are modeling.
Directly deploys a set of artifacts that reside on the node.
Is connected to other nodes in a manner that reflects the topology of the real world system.
When you draw a node in the UML,
For your project or organization as a whole, define a set of stereotypes with appropriate icons to provide meaningful visual cues to your readers.
Show only the attributes and operations (if any) that are necessary to understand the meaning of that node in the given context.