Lightblue is an open source project that aims to simplify complex service architectures by providing a flexible and metadata-driven platform. It uses technologies like MongoDB for data storage and Hystrix for latency and fault tolerance. The presentation discusses how monolithic applications can evolve into interconnected services over time, causing problems like slowness, hardcoding, and difficulty deploying. Lightblue was created to address these issues by allowing services to be easily extended and deployed in cloud environments. Additional technologies discussed include various Java collections libraries and distributed computing frameworks.