After following the instructions listed here debezium sqlserver connector and how to activate change data capture
And also making sure that the SQL-Agent is running, debezium is still not working ( streaming data to Kafka).
It turns out that CDC is broken in the initial release of sql-server 2017
Updating to cumulative update 4 or higher solves this.
Took a lot of debugging to figure this out, but I learned A LOT about how sql-server works and how the debezium driver works.