Medallion Architecture: Solving Yesterday’s Problems, Creating Today’s Headaches

At first glance, the Bronze–Silver–Gold medallion architecture appears simple and logical, offering a clean framework for data management. It was only later when I wore my Governance hat, I realized that there is more to the story then what meets the eye. In practice, it creates three times the governance burden, three times the security exposure, and three times the confusion.

So, let’s pause and ask the uncomfortable question: what problem are we solving with medallion? In the attempt to solve one problem, are we creating another?

The Promise of Medallion

In principle, the medallion architecture was never designed for governance. It was designed to bring some hygiene to messy data lakes with engineering teams taking the lead.

• Bronze (raw layer): Dump everything as-is for replay/recovery.

• Silver (clean layer): Apply some structure, cleaning, quality checks.

• Gold (curated layer): Business-friendly, aggregated, polished datasets.

On paper, this solved problems like traceability, replayability, and debugging. Which was ideal from an engineering standpoint.

The irony is that the at the core of it, the medallion architecture isn’t new at all. It is just the age-old concept of staging → integration → presentation pattern repackaged.

• Old playbook: staging (raw), integration (clean), presentation (curated).

• New branding: Bronze, Silver, Gold.

• Different target: the Lakehouse instead of a warehouse.

The core question we need to ask ourselves is this, is the need for engineering neatness so huge that we would introduce governance & security nightmares?

The Hidden Costs Nobody Talks About

While the benefits were for everyone to see and talk about, there are a few hidden costs no one wants to talk about:

Governance Becomes Layered Duplication

Instead of managing one dataset, governance teams now must track lineage, metadata, and policies across three layers for the same data. This leads to questions from business users “Which layer is the truth?” Governance is left explaining philosophy instead of enabling outcomes.

Security Scope Triples

Security now has to take care of access control, encryption, and monitoring over bronze, silver, and gold layers. These levels mean surface area for attacks has increased for sensitive data.

Metadata Graveyard

Duplication of data also leads to duplication of metadata. We have catalogs full on duplicated data which when rendered via lineage tools (Collibra, Alation, Atlan, Purview) end up showing spaghetti diagrams across Bronze–Silver–Gold.

Business Misalignment

The fact that users have to wait for data to flow through hoops (bronze to silver to gold) before they can access data is data bureaucracy.

Cost Explosion

In an era where sustainability is a corporate priority, the medallion architecture’s reliance on data duplication can be counterproductive. Duplicating datasets across layers not only increases storage and compute costs but also contributes to a larger carbon footprint in data centers

The Gold confusion

Golden sources produce raw data, yet this data is labeled Bronze. The transformation process adds complexity and often causes confusion about the true ‘Gold’ standard.

Alternatives to Medallion

There are better ways to design for today’s realities, just to name a few:

Data Virtualization: Provides a unified view of data across multiple sources without requiring physical duplication, reducing governance and compliance burdens.

Domain-Oriented Data Products (Data Mesh): Promotes decentralization by assigning ownership of data products to specific domains, enabling teams to manage governance locally while aligning with a global framework.

Semantic Layer: Creates a business-friendly interface that abstracts technical complexities, allowing users to access curated data without navigating multiple transformation layers.

Closing Thought

The medallion architecture may appear innovative, but it’s a repackaging of familiar concepts for the Lakehouse paradigm. While it provides structure, its hidden costs in governance, security, and sustainability make it less of a breakthrough and more of a trade-off. As data challenges evolve, organizations must critically assess whether medallion truly meets their needs — or if it’s time to consider more modern, scalable alternatives

Are you on the same bandwagon? What are your thoughts about it? Do comment or reach out!