AFS[3] has several benefits over traditional networked file systems, particularly in the areas of security and scalability.
[4] AFS uses Kerberos for authentication, and implements access control lists on directories for users and groups.
[5] Read and write operations on an open file are directed only to the locally cached copy.
Callbacks are discarded and must be re-established after any client, server, or network failure, including a timeout.
The shared name space (usually mounted as /afs on the Unix filesystem) is identical on all workstations.
Arla was an independent implementation of AFS developed at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
[7][8] A fourth implementation of an AFS client exists in the Linux kernel source code since at least version 2.6.10.
[9] Committed by Red Hat, this is a fairly simple implementation still incomplete as of January 2024[update].