I have to differentiate between Cloudera parcel process and writing a cook book or a reciepe of a Chef for installation of packages in a cluster.
So i'm looking for advantages and disadvantage between Parcel over Chef or Vice versa.
If you are using Cloudera Manager, parcels allow you to install/update CDH on your cluster(s) in its entirety via a single package (or, install add-on components such as betas and Cloudera Labs releases). From the docs:
Parcels are self-contained and installed in a versioned directory, which means that multiple versions of a given parcel can be installed side-by-side. You can then designate one of these installed versions as the active one. With packages, only one package can be installed at a time so there's no distinction between what's installed and what's active.
Parcel handling automatically downloads, distributes, and activates the correct parcel for the operating system running on each host in the cluster.
Parcels can only be installed via CM, so if you're not a CM user, your question is an academic one. If you are a CM user, you can choose to use either parcels (which is certainly easier) or a packages-based approach via Chef or Puppet (not as easy, but some people prefer it nonetheless).