runBlocking vs coroutineScope for certain actions

Hi all, I am very new to Kotlin and come from a Scala background, mainly from the Typelevel stack using cats-effect and the like. I’ve been told my new team use Kotlin heavily and I will be moving away from Scala for a rotation, so I am trying to get familiar with the language.

I have a quick question with regards to asynchronous programming, mainly concerning runBlocking and coroutineScope. I’m just wondering if there are general rules of thumb when using the two in production code, mainly to do with gRPC, microservices and the like, no UI code anywhere.

Am I correct in thinking a valid distinction would be to use coroutineScope when performing database writes (that I do not need to receive a result for) so the thread can continue to perform other duties as those coroutines execute?

Would an example of using runBlocking properly be when I need to perform some HTTP request, of which the result is crucial to the code immediately after the runBlocking?

Does anyone know of any resources that might detail how this works in relation to Scala’s cats-effect?

Thanks!