The MongoDB team has released the first alpha build of their new official Rust driver for MongoDB, which supports all server versions from 3.6 up and requires Rust 1.39 or newer. The driver provides a sync API with features such as native TLS using rustls crate, SCRAM-SHA-1 and SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication, and support for connecting to both MongoDB Atlas and on-premise deployments. The driver is designed from scratch to be efficient and easy to maintain, with a focus on async support and future database feature implementations like change streams and multi-document ACID transactions. Developers can try out the driver by adding it to their project's Cargo.toml and using its API to connect to MongoDB deployments, list databases and collections, and perform CRUD operations. The team invites contributions in the form of pull requests and bug reports, and provides documentation steps for setting up a free MongoDB database cluster on their Atlas cloud service.