1. HCFS stands for Hadoop Compatible File System. It allows Hadoop to access cloud storage systems like AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, and Ceph.
2. AWS S3 supports three implementations - s3:, s3n:, and s3a:. S3 cannot replace HDFS due to consistency issues but is commonly used with EMR.
3. Azure Blob Storage uses the wasbs:// scheme and hadoop-azure.jar. It supports multiple accounts and page/block blobs but lacks append and permissions.
4. CephFS can be used with Hadoop but has limited official support to Hadoop 1.1.x due to JNI issues with later versions