Hi,
Based on what you have described, it seems you are encountering issues during the deploy step of your build. The downtime may be related the App engine environment that you have set up. If you are on flexible, there is a known issue of prolonged serving time to be within the minutes range. You may find further details about this
here.
Additionally, you may find the best practices document
here useful as there are a few tips and tricks included for speeding up builds. Please feel free to determine if "
Building leaner containers" would be useful in your use case as this helps separate the building of the application within your container image thus reducing extra time.