I'm following the getting started guide at [1], but I've removed the MySQL and analytics stuff from the config settings since I do not intend to use any analytics functions. The scdf service however crashes later, saying that no data source is configured.

Ok, so it seems configuring the data source in scdf-config-kafka.yml [2] is still required (though from reading the documentation I assumed it's only for analytic stuff).

But for what? Is the data source used to persist Kafka messages, or establish cloud flow messages between nodes?

I can't find any description about the possible properties for most of the config files. I understand this is a Kubernetes ConfigMap, but that's basically all I could find.

[1] http://docs.spring.io/spring-cloud-dataflow-server-kubernetes/docs/current-SNAPSHOT/reference/htmlsingle/#_deploying_streams_on_kubernetes

[2] https://github.com/spring-cloud/spring-cloud-dataflow-server-kubernetes/blob/5ae02de306af66423d6933a0acb55315e2983a51/src/etc/kubernetes/scdf-config-kafka.yml