Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a distributed file system that stores large datasets across commodity hardware. It is highly fault tolerant, provides high throughput, and is suitable for applications with large datasets. HDFS uses a master/slave architecture where a NameNode manages the file system namespace and DataNodes store data blocks. The NameNode ensures data replication across DataNodes for reliability. HDFS is optimized for batch processing workloads where computations are moved to nodes storing data blocks.