BACKGROUND As an alternative for economic biodiesel production, the microbial production of extracellular fatty acid from renewable resources is receiving more concerns recently, since the separation of fatty acid from microorganism cells is normally involved in a series of energy-intensive steps. Many attempts have been made to construct fatty acid producing strains by targeting genes in the fatty acid biosynthetic pathway, while few studies focused on the cultivation process and the mass transfer kinetics. RESULTS In this study, both strain improvements and cultivation process strategies were applied to increase extracellular fatty acid production by engineered Escherichia coli. Our results showed overexpressing 'TesA and the deletion of fadL in E. coli BL21 (DE3) improved extracellular fatty acid production, while deletion of fadD didn't strengthen the extracellular fatty acid production for an undetermined mechanism. Moreover, the cultivation process controls contributed greatly to extracellular fatty acid production with respect to titer, cell growth and productivity by adjusting the temperature, adding ampicillin and employing on-line extraction. Under optimal conditions, the E. coli strain (pACY-'tesA-ΔfadL) produced 4.8 g L⁻¹ extracellular fatty acid, with the specific productivity of 0.02 g h⁻¹ g⁻¹ dry cell mass, and the yield of 4.4% on glucose, while the ratios of cell-associated fatty acid versus extracellular fatty acid were kept below 0.5 after 15 h of cultivation. The fatty acids included C12:1, C12:0, C14:1, C14:0, C16:1, C16:0, C18:1, C18:0. The composition was dominated by C14 and C16 saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. Using the strain pACY-'tesA, similar results appeared under the same culture conditions and the titer was also much higher than that ever reported previously, which suggested that the supposedly superior strain did not necessarily perform best for the efficient production of desired product. The strain pACY-'tesA could also be chosen as the original strain for the next genetic manipulations. CONCLUSIONS The general strategy of metabolic engineering for the extracellular fatty acid production should be the cyclic optimization between cultivation performance and strain improvements. On the basis of our cultivation process optimization, strain improvements should be further carried out for the effective and cost-effective production process.