Regarding your first question:
In any case, to show the equivalent of deployment areas / data centers in the deployment diagram?
I usually use Notes for this.
And your second question:
How about a platform as a service? The entire Machine instance is a Node idea that is completely destroyed at that moment. What are you doing in this case? Treat the entire PaaS provider as the only node and forget about the details?
I would say yes for your last answer. And I suppose you could take more detailed information from the definition of the deployment model and its elements. Specifically at the end of this paragraph:
They [Nodes] can be nested and can be connected in arbitrary complexity systems using communication paths. Typically, nodes represent either hardware devices or software runtimes .
and
ExecutionEnvironments are standard software systems that application components may require at runtime.
source: http://www.omg.org/spec/UML/2.5/Beta1/
gustavogbc
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