Dominika: I need to add: S3 is not a real filesystem. You cannot safely use AWS S3 it as a replacement for HDFS without a metadata consistency layer, and even then the eventual consistency of S3 updates and deletes cause problems.
you can safely use it as a source of data. To use as a direct destination of work takes care: consult the documentation specific to the version of Hadoop you are using before trying to make S3 the default filesystem.
Special case: third party object stores with full consistency. The fact that directory renames are not atomic may still cause problems with commit algorithms and the like, but the risk of corrupt data in the absence of failures is gone.