Post by Andreas Kretz

For Data Engineers, structure is everything. And Medallion Architecture brings just that. But what is Medallion Architecture exactly, and why is it a go-to approach for modern data platforms? It’s a simple layered design, often seen in Data Warehouse architectures. Named after Olympic medals, it structures your data into three zones: 🥉 Bronze – Ingested raw data, untouched 🥈 Silver – Cleaned and transformed data 🥇 Gold – Final data products for analytics, BI, or ML The power here is in incremental processing and data quality improvements at each step. It’s not a data model, but a design concept that helps you build better pipelines. Why it matters for Data Engineers: - You can reprocess data anytime from raw - Each layer has clear responsibilities - Governance and access control become manageable - You decouple ingestion from heavy transformations (ELT-style) We use this exact structure in one of the Azure projects in my Academy. ➡️ Football API data goes into the Bronze layer as raw JSON. ➡️ In Silver, we apply schema, merge, convert to Delta. ➡️ In Gold, we pre-aggregate match stats, making the data ready for reporting. ⚠️ Check out the project and see Medallion Architecture in action. Link is in the comments 👇