Business Scenario
Your company is planning to develop extension applications on the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). Your software developers have different devices and operating systems, but they need a common development environment for their work that runs independently of their technical system setup. The development environment should provide all tools for modern cloud development, especially the specific tools required for business application development in the SAP ecosystem.
Introduction to SAP Business Application Studio
SAP Business Application Studio is a professional developer tool tailored for efficient development of business applications and extension of SAP solutions. With the set of high productivity tools, SAP Business Application Studio aims both to harmonize and simplify the developer experience, helping developers to gain more productivity with SAP Business Applications development. It is an SAP BTP service that offers a modern development environment tailored for business application development. You access the development environment using your internet browser. Nevertheless, it provides a desktop-like development experience.
In terms of service subscriptions, you can choose between the two service plans: "Free" for Free Tier and "Standard Edition". Visit the SAP Discovery Center to find all available commercial models. In addition, you can also check the respective availability of the SAP Business Application Studio for your hyperscaler provider and region.

If you already know Microsoft Visual Studio Code and you access SAP Business Application Studio for the first time, you might notice many similarities. That is because SAP Business Application Studio is based on the open-source version of Visual Studio Code ("Code - OSS").
The development environment offers you all tools required for your business application development, including a command line and editors optimized for different use cases.
At the heart of SAP Business Application Studio, there are the dev spaces. The dev spaces are isolated environments in the cloud containing tailored tools and preinstalled runtimes per business scenario, such as SAP Fiori, SAP S/4HANA extensions, workflow applications, mobile applications, and more. Technically, a dev space is implemented as a Kubernetes Pod, with multiple containers providing the tools and extensions. Check out this blog post for more technical information about dev spaces.
