To decrease build time while using Cloud Build, what is a recommended action?

Using Cloud Storage to cache intermediate artifacts is a recommended practice to decrease build time when utilizing Cloud Build. By caching intermediate artifacts, subsequent builds can skip redundant operations and reuse previously built components. This technique is particularly effective in large projects where certain dependencies or build results do not change frequently. Instead of rebuilding everything from scratch on each build, the process can leverage cached artifacts, significantly reducing the overall time spent.

In contrast, the other options may not be as effective. Adjusting the machine type to a larger virtual machine could lead to faster computation, but this approach increases costs and may not always result in a linear decrease in build time. Running multiple Jenkins agents can parallelize builds, but it might complicate the build process and does not directly address the efficiency of individual builds in the Cloud Build environment. Using multiple smaller build steps could sometimes lead to improvements, but such an approach may also create overhead in managing these steps and may not guarantee a reduction in total execution time.