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Support remote string paths for h5netcdf engine #8423

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@jrbourbeau

Description

@jrbourbeau

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Currently the h5netcdf engine supports opening remote files, but only already open file-like objects (e.g. s3fs.open(...)), not string paths like s3://.... There are situations where I'd like to use string paths instead of open file-like objets

  • Opening files can sometimes be slow (xref Opening lots of files can be slow fsspec/s3fs#816)
  • When using parallel=True for opening lots of files, serializing open file-like objects back and forth from a remote cluster can be slow
  • Some systems (e.g. NASA Earthdata) only hand out credentials that are valid when run in the same region as the data. Being able to use parallel=True + storage_options would be convenient/performant in that case.

Describe the solution you'd like

It would be nice if I could do something like the following:

ds = xr.open_mfdataset(
    files,    # A bunch of files like `s3://bucket/file`
    engine="h5netcdf",
    ...
    parallel=True,
    storage_options={...},    # fsspec-compatible options
)

and have my files opened prior to handing off to h5netcdf. storage_options is already supported for Zarr, so hopefully extending to h5netcdf feels natural.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

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