Presentations

An archive of my recorded conference presentations, keynotes, and meetups covering OpenTelemetry, Observability, gRPC, Apache Beam, Kubernetes, Istio, and distributed systems architecture.

All recordings are available in the Alex Van Boxel - Recorded Talks YouTube playlist.

2026

Taming Tenancy, Cost and Architecture at Collibra Through OpenTelemetry and Our Telemetry Backbone

• Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 (CNCF)
• Date: June 2026

Operating a SaaS platform presents unique observability challenges. At scale, multi-tenancy introduces a huge multiplier on observability signals, impacting cost and effectiveness. This session explores leveraging the C4 model to give telemetry structural context, enabling signal attribution, virtual chargebacks, and custom-built OpenTelemetry collector pipelines.

2025

The Enterprise Is Ready for gRPC

• Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 (CNCF)
• Date: November 2025

A look into how Collibra adopted gRPC across enterprise microservices, tackling schema evolution, automated client generation, load balancing, and production readiness.

Master Observability with Expert Strategies for Unified Troubleshooting

• Conference: Google Cloud Events / Next 2025
• Date: April 2025

Strategies for unified observability and troubleshooting across cloud environments, combining Google Cloud operations and OpenTelemetry signals.

2024

Lightning Talk: Global Tenant Management Using Argo

• Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 (CNCF)
• Date: November 2024

For the Collibra data intelligence platform, a tenant is a combination of applications provisioned on a mixture of virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters. This lightning talk covers managing global tenant lifecycle and deployments using Argo.

The Science of Signals: Mastering Telemetry for Observability

• Conference: Devoxx Belgium 2024
• Speakers: Alex Van Boxel & Maximilien Richer
• Date: October 2024

Modern software systems are complex beasts. This deep-dive explores how to properly instrument software, cut through telemetry noise, and master metrics, traces, and logs for actionable observability.

2023

Scaling up the OpenTelemetry Collector with Beam Go

• Conference: Beam Summit 2023 (Apache Beam)
• Date: July 2023

The OpenTelemetry Collector has many architectural parallels with an Apache Beam pipeline. This talk explores how Apache Beam with the Go SDK can scale OpenTelemetry stream processing to massive throughput.

2022

Collibra’s Telemetry Backbone: OpenTelemetry and Apache Beam

• Conference: Beam Summit 2022 (Apache Beam)
• Date: August 2022

When a company scales out a SaaS platform, standard observability tools fall short. Learn how Collibra built an in-house telemetry backbone using OpenTelemetry and Apache Beam for stream processing and signal transformation.

Combine by Example: OpenTelemetry Exponential Histogram

• Conference: Beam Summit 2022 (Apache Beam)
• Date: August 2022

A deep technical dive into Apache Beam’s Combine fn mechanics and how it can be used to compute OpenTelemetry exponential histograms over high-volume streams.

2021

Give Me Back My Data

• Conference: Beam College 2021 (Apache Beam)
• Date: April 2021

Alex shares data engineering use cases and stream-processing patterns solved with Apache Beam and its preceding technologies.

Know Your Peers

• Conference: IstioCon 2021
• Date: March 2021

It’s lonely in your pod, but finally you receive a knock on the port… can you trust that inbound request? A deep dive into peer authentication, mTLS, and identity validation in Istio service mesh.

2019

Protobeam: Protobuf Power in the Beam Pipeline

• Conference: Beam Summit Europe 2019 (Apache Beam)
• Date: June 2019

Augmenting Protocol Buffers typed message formats in Apache Beam pipelines to cleanly integrate with backends like Bigtable, BigQuery, and Spanner.

2018

Cloud - War Stories

• Conference: Devoxx Belgium 2018
• Speakers: Gert Leenders, Alex Van Boxel, Michaël Hompus, Tim Bogaert
• Date: November 2018

Real-world cloud migration war stories, failures, lessons learned, and architectural pitfalls when running workloads at scale in the cloud.

Implementing a SplittableParDo

• Conference: Beam Summit London 2018 (Apache Beam)
• Date: October 2018

Implementing Splittable DoFn (SplittableParDo) in Apache Beam for high-throughput, IO-bound, and non-trivial streaming sources.

GKE Architecture Patterns for Retail and Financial Services

• Conference: Google Cloud Next ‘18
• Date: July 2018

Architectural patterns, reliability strategies, and compliance best practices for running critical enterprise workloads on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

2017

Istio: An Open Platform to Connect, Manage, and Secure Microservices

• Conference: DevFest Nantes 2017
• Date: October 2017

Introducing the Istio service mesh: routing, security, mutual TLS, traffic shifting, and observability between microservices.

2016

Eddystone: The Open Location Beacon Standard

• Conference: Devoxx Belgium 2016
• Date: November 2016

Deep dive into Google’s open Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon standard Eddystone, frame formats (UID, URL, TLM, EID), and practical proximity applications.

gRPC High Performance RPC Framework

• Conference: DevFest Belgium 2016
• Date: October 2016

An introduction to gRPC, HTTP/2 multiplexing, Protocol Buffers schema contracts, and replacing REST for internal microservice communication.

2015

Devoxx Registration: Creating Our Own Android Printer Driver

• Conference: Devoxx Belgium 2015
• Date: November 2015

Building a custom Android USB printer driver and high-speed badge printing setup for 3,500+ attendees at the Devoxx conference.

Second Generation “Workflow Managers” for Big Data

• Conference: Devoxx Belgium 2015
• Date: November 2015

Moving beyond cron into modern workflow orchestrators for big data pipelines, discussing DAG execution, scheduling, and data lineage.

See also