Elasticsearch has been a leading solution for log management and analytics, but its limitations in handling scalable logging volumes and cloud-native operations have prompted Slack to develop KalDB, a new project discussed by Suman Karumuri. KalDB, which shares its foundation with Apache Lucene, is designed to automatically scale with logging volume, handle field conflicts on read, and offer multi-tenancy with isolation, which are improvements over Elasticsearch. The system is cloud-native, easing operations on platforms like Kubernetes, and aims to unify events, logs, and traces (ELT) data under a single system for simplified infrastructure and more expressive queries. The project also enhances tracing capabilities for software and business processes, and while it shares roots with the OpenSearch project, KalDB is intended to become open-source, with its initial source already available on GitHub.